Community CIP Editor Robert Phair: 8 month budget

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Robert Phair

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Individual

[GENERAL] Requested funds in ada

100000

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

8

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

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

Robert Phair has 3 years experience as a Community CIP editor (not employed by Cardano companies), and continuing Catalyst funding of Cardano's standards process will keep driving our ecosystem value.

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

Yes

[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.”

Dependency: The proposer Robert Phair must remain a member of the official CIP Editors group, with write permissions to the CIPs repository; without such permissions, it would be impossible perform the work for this or any "CIP Editing" project.

Only a small number of individuals have ever had the clearance to work as CIP editors, based on their being granted write permission by the Cardano Foundation to the CIPs GitHub repository. Robert Phair has held this permission since October 2021.

These permissions are only visible to repository owners, but can be verified for the proposer with this GitHub query (KPI: most recent approved pull requests reviewed by rphair) by viewing the green check-marks in the history for each item (only official CIP Editors can place these on potential changes).

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

Yes

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

CIPs (Cardano Improvement Proposals) and CPSs (Cardano Problem Statements) are always open source by design. The proposer and other editors work with CIP and CPS authors to confirm either Creative Commons or Apache licensing (generally by narrative vs. code content) as a requirement built into the CIP process: see (CIP-0001 > Licensing).

Furthermore, all documentation regarding the CIP Process used by editors, reviewers and the community is also published as open source: see the CIP Wiki authored by the proposer (Creative Commons license indicated in page footer).

[METADATA] Horizons

Standards

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

NOTE: excerpts from the CIP Wiki at the Cardano Foundation repository have all been written by the proposer Robert Phair.

1 - Why are CIPs vital in general? Why does this CIP process need Catalyst support?

From the CIP Wiki, Why does Cardano need a CIP process, editors, and development standards? :

The success of a blockchain is prefaced, at least in part, by how broad and useful to developers its extensible standards are: as seen already in Bitcoin and Ethereum's evolution from their initial days of obscurity through their rise in popularity and value with the addition of modern commercial standards like the Ethereum’s familiar token standard of ERC-20.

Not only do CIPs document what official Cardano blockchain developers are doing to improve core technologies and conventions, they also expand the scope of what the larger Cardano community will deliver: through standards submitted by independent developers and architects. Once a standard is proposed through a CIP, it becomes a reference point upon which other developers and agencies can build: which promotes new applications and broadening markets for Cardano.

Each well defined standard promotes more rapid development since developers have an increasing number of CIP-based tools and methods to employ in their projects. The best example of this in Cardano's early years has been the proliferation of NFTs, since these are generally designed by third parties according to CIPs coming from the community itself rather than Cardano’s core developers.

Any developer, engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, or user should have a means of proposing one of these standards. This process is documented in CIP-0001, which defined and created this process… a document which itself is regularly updated as editors and reviewers continue to refine our process in practice.

2 - What will the Proposer do for the CIP process?

The proposer — a co-architect of the CIP process, with 3+ years of experience as a CIP editor, reviewer, author, and educator — has heavily supported the routine workload for this community-wide standards process, while maintaining key developer relations and community outreach and while documenting the CIP process for the public.

Aside from the proposer's evolving role as "Community Editor", CIP editors have mainly provided review and community driven CIP submissions, though without routine attention to the quality and consistency of the CIP repository itself that has been provisioned through the proposer's regular Catalyst funding.

The CIP process also needs to evolve with how people are using it: so at least one dedicated Editor needs to anticipate the expectations of companies, developers and individuals to develop methods and documentation that will suit the community as a whole.

The proposer has always argued for customer service in the CIP process on par with other well-maintained open source projects, which today all editors collectively are committed to achieving: a perception which supports the legitimacy of Cardano in the eyes of the developer / academic / investor community.

Particularly, the proposer's presence on the CIP team has always assured prompt responses and quick turnaround times on most days of the year: rather than requiring participants to wait for periodic meetings or allocations in a corporate employee's schedule. "Community Editor" funding through Project Catalyst has assured this high availability is proceeding through its third year.

The proposer's and other editors' community outreach (see original posting here) has resulted, and will continue to result, in countless cooperative tasks & educational efforts to:

• accommodate others’ points of view and make decisions only by consensus
• explain Cardano proposed standards better to non-experts
• cross language barriers and translate standards whenever possible
• ensure that standards remain useful for educational purposes
• establish enough reliability and accountability in the CIP process that CIPs themselves can (and will) be used as the basis for Governance decisions and community voting.

3 - Why is a robust CIP process especially vital for the next 8 months, i.e. through Cardano's dawning Governance period?

While the CIP process is not "governance" itself, all required Governance features require CIP-based standards to define them... since they involve so much coordination between separate companies, tools, tool developers, users, dApps, and educators to:

• create a vocabulary and procedures for participants, governance tools & dApps to share information about governance propositions and decisions
• define a common form for a Cardano Constitution and outline a process for approving it
• provide context for governance decisions to assure a transparent and effective voting process

For more detail about these efforts, see SanchoNet (the Governance pilot testnet) > Governance Metadata Standards.

Also, as Cardano's development becomes less dependent upon individual companies, the Cardano community will have opportunities to vote to initiate major changes through a "hard fork" (new protocol version):

• These are vital to define as CIPs to ensure there is no ambiguity to any change that the voting public considers for Cardano's evolution.
• Expressing these as open source standards, so they may be accepted through common interest by informed participants, will help Cardano grow beyond the scope of whatever any particular company is able to invent or administer themselves.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

1 - Impact of CIP process itself

Abridged from What general benefits does the CIP process provide to the Cardano ecosystem & infrastructure? :

The most basic benefit is that Cardano has a standards process... which helps legitimise Cardano compared to alternatives in the highly competitive cryptocurrency industry, in which huge amounts of capital are directed according to small differences in developer experience and times-to-market.

Specific benefits include:

• New applications: identifying new markets for Cardano when more than one agency implements these standards (e.g. different NFT-based businesses).
• Efficiency of development: companies and developers not having to "reinvent the wheel" or suffer interoperability problems once standards have paved the way for common development.
• Educational value: a good percentage of CIPs are documentation themselves.
• Open source commitment: encouraging the Cardano community to converge on open-source implementations, and to open-source their APIs and other interfaces for a more cooperative and more quickly growing ecosystem.
• Number and quality of standards: gradually increasing the base of Cardano's cooperative development.

From How can the Cardano Community verify that CIPs are making a difference? :

The evolution of the Internet, followed by the emergence of astonishingly valuable blockchain assets (many of which are strong competitors to Cardano), has shown us that robust open source standards in Cardano’s design and governance will lead to:

• higher & more sustainable native asset values;
• more & better interrelated business propositions;
• increased adoption relative to other blockchains;
• an anticipated freedom from regulation if claims of decentralised governance can be upheld.

Extended from Is the CIP process of any direct benefit to the Cardano community and Ada holders? :

Four years into Cardano's CIP process (as of late 2024), we can verify direct benefits from standardisation in both long-time and emergent CIP-anchored fields:

• NFT standards have supported the most economically valuable of Cardano’s interactive components.
• Wallet standards will drive many commercial implementations, promoting Ada as a currency with consequently increased market capitalisation and utility driving a higher ADA value.
• Governance standards will help dismiss claims of centralised control, including the notion that Cardano is a “security” and must be registered as an investment proposition: while irrefutably decentralised governance will promote less regulated adoption with greater capitalisation and liquidity also supporting a higher ADA value.
• Protocol standards are paving the way for a distributed approach to developing the Cardano chain itself: encouraging innovation from any company with a commercial interest (not just Cardano's original developers).

NOTE also the recently launched Cardano Foundation page Our Cardano (on "Ethos and Principles") identifies "CIP Adherence: Standards compliance and integration of improvements" as a key Governance metric.

2 - Impact of proposer's contribution to the CIP process workload

Firstly, the regular time allocation through Project Catalyst generally allows the proposer to contribute a greater share of the ongoing upkeep of the CIP repository and to interact with authors & reviewers more quickly and more regularly.

NOTE readers should be aware that CIP Editors, along with any employer they may have, are all effectively volunteers and therefore there should be no competitive "ranking" by apparent contributions: especially since each editor's interest and ability to perform the routine work will be driven by interest and circumstance.

• Therefore these statistics are only quoted to verify the effectiveness of Catalyst funding in supporting the total workload of Cardano's CIP process... especially since Catalyst auditors have mandated the use of KPIs in establishing project validity and milestone completion.

Suggested KPI for individual contributions as measured in GitHub (the number of pull requests [repository updates] each current editor has participated in), as of Wed 16 Oct 2024 06:50 UTC (clickable search links):

• 36 current + 524 completed (involves:rphair) [the proposer]
• 30 current + 306 completed (involves:Ryun1)
• 17 current + 219 completed (involves:Crypto2099)
• 5 current + 24 completed (involves:perturbing)

Though this should also be seen in context and non-competitively, this constant contribution is the basis for the proposer being by far the most prolific contributor to the CIP repository (KPI: repository contributions & contributors).

Secondly, while other CIP editors are able to offer more complete skills as blockchain developers, the proposer's more general background brings these unique qualities into Cardano's standards effort:

• Excellence in grammar & writing skills (worked in technical writing / documentation & technical education since the 1990's);
• Decades of customer service experience in the I.T. field, reflected in a "trouble ticket" -like approach to submitted documents and raised issues;
• An attention to detail and completeness resulting in a vast number of "housekeeping" pull requests (also a KPI) resulting in a readable, usable, and efficiently structured standards repository.

3 - Impact of the proposer's community outreach, public reporting & visibility

The results of community engagement can be seen, for example, in this major update to Cardano's key standards document CIP-0001 which defines the CIP process itself (CIP-0001 | Annual overhaul and process update #924) which readers can verify addresses several sectors of the ecosystem, spanning different companies and parallel, ongoing standards efforts.

• Similar issues and "pull requests" will continue to demonstrate that professional developers supporting the CIP process, as well as community observers, have voice & visibility in how that process evolves.

Similar efforts can be seen in the proposer's monthly reports (see cip-editing repository) from October 2022 (beginning of F9 funding) through present:

• The community is welcome to view, subscribe to, and enquire about these reports... the proposer believes it takes as much effort to produce a compete report as an incomplete one, and therefore regular explanations of what the CIP process is doing should be made useful to the public: by keeping the work of CIP editors visible and understandable.
• Example (latest) monthly report: Community CIP Editing: Robert Phair, September 2024

Finally, the proposer stands out among past and present CIP editors in commitment to document the CIP process and engage potentially interested members of the community. The CIP Wiki, mentioned often in this proposal, should therefore also be considered in its impact to bring the entire Cardano community into better awareness of Cardano's standards process: which would still continue without the proposer, but likely with far less visibility to & engagement with the general public.

4 - Impact of CIP process remaining decentralised

From Why doesn’t the Cardano Foundation (the repo owner) govern & fund the whole CIP process directly? :

Having a mix of independent and professionally affiliated editors provides a broad range of skills & social channels to cover more ground in community, communication, and documentation, while retaining some established company affiliations which can be vital to secure high-quality CIP reviews and to validate implementation paths for the CIPs that are accepted.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

This proposal continues the proposer's ongoing work in Cardano's CIP process from early 2021 through the present day. That work is validated constantly by the Cardano community as a whole: including standards specialists, developer representatives of many Cardano contributing companies, and any community member who wishes to observe or audit the proposer's online contributions (see KPIs in Impact section above) or attend regular CIP meetings.

There is no doubt this project can be delivered because this work has already helped build the foundation of Cardano's body of standards over the last 4 years, with any ongoing view of the CIP repository showing the proposer's constant and vital support.

Before being funded by Catalyst as of Fund 9, the proposer had already spent 1 year as a CIP editing "volunteer" after an initial half-year of being a regular observer at CIP meetings over the course of co-authoring CIP-0013.

History of Catalyst funding and related accomplishments

Fund 9 accomplishments (F9: Community CIP Editor: 1 year budget):

• Providing a vital transition, with continuity of a CIP process that was not yet completely documented, between original CIP editors from IOG, CF & Emurgo and the current editing team admitted to replace them as the original members withdrew from CIP work.
• This included the routine work to sustain Cardano's standards process during this attrition of other editors, whose changing professional responsibilities separated them from CIP commitments.
• Both these factors demonstrate the proposer's capability to achieve these project goals despite a wide variation in potential circumstances.

Fund 9 project completion video: CIP Editing annual report through Catalyst Fund 9

Fund 10 accomplishments (F10: Community CIP Editor: 1 year budget (continued):

• Q1 milestone: standardising form of all old CIPs dating back to Cardano's early days
• Q2 milestone: authoring the CIP Wiki, to fully document the CIP process and help the community observe and participate
• Q3 milestone: state tagging, which streamlined the CIP process & finally cleaned up the "backlog"
• Q4 milestone (goal left to proposer's discretion): major overhaul of CIP-0001 (the original definition of the CIP process) in response to evolving developer, company, and community relationships
• [completion report & video pending: due in October 2024]

Note on "managing funds"

This project proposes straightforward payment for hours of work — without capital or other expenditure — that have already been delivered as a matter of daily routine for the last 3+ years. Therefore there is no circumstance in which a shortfall of funds could diminish the proposer's ability to do the work required for this project.

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Work & funding period: 3 calendar months October through December 2024.

Outputs: (as described in section BUDGET & COSTS) monthly reports for each of these months

Acceptance criteria: Each monthly report for this period contains summaries & links Catalyst auditors and community members can use to verify the performance of all "funded activities" (as listed in section BUDGET & COSTS).

Evidence of completion: Each monthly report is posted at proposer's cip-editing GitHub repository.

Work & funding period: 2 calendar months January and February 2025.

Outputs: (as described in section BUDGET & COSTS) monthly reports for each of these months

Acceptance criteria: Each monthly report for this period contains summaries & links Catalyst auditors and community members can use to verify the performance of all "funded activities" (as listed in section BUDGET & COSTS)

Evidence of completion: Each monthly report is posted at proposer's cip-editing GitHub repository.

Work & funding period: 2 calendar months March and April 2025.

Outputs: (as described in section BUDGET & COSTS) monthly reports for each of these months

Acceptance criteria: Each monthly report for this period contains summaries & links Catalyst auditors and community members can use to verify the performance of all "funded activities" (as listed in section BUDGET & COSTS)

Evidence of completion: Each monthly report is posted at proposer's cip-editing GitHub repository.

Work & funding period: 1 calendar month of May 2025.

Outputs:

• (as described in section BUDGET & COSTS) monthly reports for each of these months
• final video and report covering accomplishments over 8 month term of the project

Acceptance criteria:

• Each monthly report for this period contains summaries & links Catalyst auditors and community members can use to verify the performance of all "funded activities" (as listed in section BUDGET & COSTS).
• Final video and report are posted according to Project Catalyst specifications.

Evidence of completion:

• Each monthly report is posted at proposer's cip-editing GitHub repository.
• Final video and report are accepted by the Project Catalyst auditors.

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Details for proposer Robert Phair (the sole provider of this funded work)

GitHub: rphair

X crypto handle: @COSDpool

Cardano Forum: @COSDpool

Web site: cosd.com

CIP-related qualifications & links:

• Longest serving current CIP Editor: as listed on cips.cardano.org and on Cardano Foundation CIP repository front page
• CIP repository most prolific contributor
• Author of Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs): Wiki and currently its sole maintainer
• CIP-0001 (Cardano's first CIP): co-author
• CIP-0013: co-author & maintainer
• Discord > CIP Editors Meetings official server (invite) - CIP discussion & developer relations in #general and specialist topics channels
• Group moderator of CIP Room, Cardano Professional Society (independent MBO)

Cardano general qualifications (beginning 2020):

• Cardano Developer Portal: most prolific contributor outside Cardano Foundation
• Wrote Security section of official Cardano community documentation on Dev Portal (standards of Air Gap Environment & Secure Transaction Workflow)
• Frankenwallet - invention & documentation of bootable USB-based secure environment, to eliminate need for dedicated "air gapped" hardware for crypto security: effectively an open-source DIY hardware wallet
• Stake pool operator (COSD: single pool) since Q3 2020; seven-time winner of Cardano Foundation community delegation
• Cardano Summit, September 2021: Standards panellist on Governance track

Relevant experience prior to blockchain (pre-2020; see C.V. / Resume)

• UNIX/Linux systems integrator, project manager, and software standards architect since late 1980's.
• Computer industry consultant with thirty years of professional experience in systems integration, networking, programming / design, technical writing, and project management.
• Business advisor for cloud computing, online marketing & commerce, data security, technical training and emerging technologies.

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

1 - Funding period

The period for this project is set to be adjacent with these previous funded projects with neither any gaps nor overlaps:

• (F9: Community CIP Editor: 1 year budget): months Oct 2022 - Sept 2023
• (F10: Community CIP Editor: 1 year budget (continued)): months Oct 2023 - Sept 2024
• This project (8 months): Oct 2024 - May 2025

The 8 month period for this project will allow better allocation of incoming funds vs. work schedule:

• The shorter time period helps reconcile the required weekly work hours with the relatively new 100K funding cap on this Catalyst category to yield a fair but reasonable hourly rate (see rate calculation below).
• By the time the first Fund 13 payments are distributed, the first 3 months of project work & reporting (Oct - Dec 2024) will already be done: corresponding to the first project milestone.
• The final milestone in May 2025 is expected to coincide with Catalyst Fund 14 launch, at which time a similar period of funding will be pursued, to insure continuous support by Catalyst of the proposer's substantial role in Cardano's CIP effort.

2 - Funded activities

The CIP Wiki section What does a CIP editor do? (written by the proposer, and up-to-date as of this proposal submission) has a complete inventory of regular tasks, summarised with time estimates here:

Daily GitHub review (6 hours / week = 12 hours biweekly) - Responding to all CIP postings and comments from authors and reviewing developers, as well as soliciting and providing reviews to ensure any standards documents have been rigorously discussed and agreed upon by any potential implementors, stakeholders, and users.

• For examples, see this latest work report section: September 2024 > Work on pull requests

Spontaneous activities (4 hours / week = 8 hours biweekly) - Community outreach, response, discussions & communications; creating & moderating particular channels for developer feedback about common standards interests; interaction with representatives of Cardano companies; creating and resolving issues about CIP process itself.

Bi-weekly meetings (3 hours biweekly) - Meetings, open to the public with CIP developers from key Cardano projects & companies present, for verbal discussion and visibility to introduce new standards candidates, review the more challenging items, and finalise acceptance of new CIPs (roughly 1 hour preparation, 1 hour for meeting, 1 hour follow-up).

Maintenance projects (2 hours / week = 4 hours biweekly) - Efforts to keep the CIP process both efficient and accessible to the community, including developer-driven updates to standards procedures (the "living documents" CIP-0001 and CIP-9999), regular updates to the CIP Wiki, and automation of GitHub workflow when possible.

• For examples of these two categories, see this latest work report section: September 2024 > Qualitative contributions & Community interaction
• See also this proposal's section Capability/Feasibility > History of Catalyst funding and related accomplishments for a list of maintenance projects inventoried as prior project milestones, which will also require maintenance & similar work over any present & future time period.

Project reporting (1.5 hours / week = 3 hours biweekly) - Producing auditable reports to Catalyst moderators, CIP process participants, and the Cardano community of the proposer's own work on the CIP process: including term reports required by Project Catalyst itself.

• This represents 1 hour of "project management" and reporting per 9 hours of direct project-related work, or 10% "overhead" — well under the typical 15% overhead often seen on Catalyst projects.
• See proposer's cip-editing repository for work reports from October 2022 (beginning of F9 funding) through present.

TOTAL time allocation = 12+8+3+4+3 = 30 hours biweekly = 15 hours / week

3 - Time budget for monthly intervals & project total

15 hours/week * 50 weeks/year / 12 months/year = 62.5 hours/month

Payment = 200 ada/hour * 62.5 hours/month = 12500 ada/month

Instalments = 12500 ada/month * 8 months = 100000 ada TOTAL

Reference hourly rate (by CoinGecko ADA/USD @ Thu 10 Oct 2024 09:40 UTC, 80 minutes before submission deadline) = $0.3362 * 200 = US $67.24 per hour

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

Justification for hourly rate

The payment rate of 200 ada/hour (at time of proposal finalisation, roughly US $70/hour) is comparable with modest "project management" bill rates for often non-technical workers, while on this project it includes:

• The unique speciality of four years' accumulated historical knowledge of CIP contributors and histories spanning every sector of Cardano's open source ecosystem: assuring high quality reviews from subject matter experts with cross-references between similar proposals in key standards areas;
• Technical writing, with practical suggestions & often co-writing on approximately 100 of Cardano's official standards documents;
• Leadership and initiative in building Cardano's standards as well as its process of standards development: generally compensated at well above the modest hourly rate requested in the proposer's Catalyst bids for CIP editor funding.

Justification for number of hours

The requested time budget of 15 hours per week is equal to the proposer's Fund 10 allocation about 15 months earlier. Given that the CIP archive has increased in volume and the work therefore increased in scope, the proposer is progressively demonstrating that — through funded experience — greater amounts of work can be accomplished on the same budget (due to accumulated experience and insight).

This number of hours also roughly corresponds to the amount of time a professionally employed CIP editor might spend contributing to the CIP effort: given that they generally will have other work responsibilities... and from the community's point of view, it assures continuous availability of the CIP process which might not be guaranteed if the CIP team consisted only of traditionally employed developers.

Equity value of the CIP process itself

As the proposer hoped in mid-2021 when initially invited to be a CIP editor, the ongoing precedent of funding editors on Catalyst has maintained a decentralised standards process that is uncoupled from bureaucratic constraints including potential or perceived conflicts of interest that might result from the Cardano Foundation paying editors directly to manage its own repository (see CIP Wiki > The CIP process is decentralised).

As sometimes seen on other blockchains, the huge incentive to leverage the standards process to support private interests (e.g., block producers on Bitcoin and Ethereum) is effectively removed on Cardano at the comparatively negligible cost of the proposer's own Catalyst projects plus the time loaned from Intersect, IOG, and private businesses by other current CIP editors.

Equity value of proposer's work on the CIP process

This derives from the proposer's personal commitment — claimed in funded Catalyst projects and verified in reporting and feedback from other editors and the developer community — that repeated Catalyst funding will repeatedly assure a quality of the CIP process that would not otherwise be possible.

Other current CIP editors, due to work responsibilities or private business demands, are generally not able to provide high-level maintenance of the CIP repository itself. The proposer's funded presence as the key repository maintainer and meeting convenor (a role originally staffed by the Cardano Foundation in the early days of the CIP effort) ensures that Cardano's standards have the same high quality appearance and responsiveness that one would expect from the most respected open source projects.

The Cardano Foundation is arguably getting the best deal of all, since they have the benefit of a fully-managed repository without budget allocation for either repository management or direct maintenance of the CIP process. This is therefore another example where Catalyst funding has, through individuals' own interests, organically provided a decentralised means to complete the aims & goals of the community as a whole.