Last updated 3 months ago
Cardano's reputation and ecosystem value depend on creation and maintenance of Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs) through a standards process requiring dedicated attention from specialist editors.
Robert Phair has 4 years experience as a confirmed CIP editor: with a demonstrated history supporting quality, accountability, high availability, and strong developer relations in the CIP process.
This is the total amount allocated to Community CIP Editor Robert Phair: 6 month budget.
NB: Monthly reporting was deprecated from January 2024 and replaced fully by the Milestones Program framework. Learn more here
Please provide your proposal title
Community CIP Editor Robert Phair: 6 month budget
Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA
60000
Please specify how many months you expect your project to last
6
Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated
No
Original Language
en
What is the problem you want to solve?
Cardano's reputation and ecosystem value depend on creation and maintenance of Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs) through a standards process requiring dedicated attention from specialist editors.
Supporting links
Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?
Yes
Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'
Proposer must remain a member of the CIP Editors group: https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/blob/master/README.md#editors
Will your project's outputs be fully open source?
Yes
License and Additional Information
All CIP repository documents are open source by design. Authors and/or editors select either Creative Commons or Apache licensing (generally according to narrative vs. code content) as required by the CIP process: see CIP-0001, section Licensing.
Also, all CIP Process documentation is published as open source: e.g. CIP-0001 itself (see License field in the header and the Copyright notice at the end); e.g. the CIP Wiki authored by the proposer (Creative Commons license linked in page footers).
Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal
Standards
Who you’re targeting, how you’ll reach them, and why this matters for Cardano.
Extracted from section Impact: Qualitative factors (Benefits)
Developers:
Businesses: sharing open source standards yields faster times to market
Asset holders: support of token values through Cardano technical eminence and a steadily growing standards repository
Other CIP editors: bulk of repository maintenance and routine communication are independently funded
Provide a list of key activities of your project?
Daily Review: GitHub pull requests and issues
Bi-weekly meetings on Discord, including:
Spontaneous and Maintenance activities requiring deeper involvement:
Reporting (monthly, with links to all tasks above)
What are your success metrics?
Enumerated from section Impact: Quantitative factors (KPIs)
See that section for these links:
Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem
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?
(adapted from the Wiki: Why does Cardano need a CIP process, editors, and development standards?)
CIPs (Cardano Improvement Proposals) document what core Cardano developers are doing to improve fundamental technologies and conventions. They also expand the field of creative and commercial possibility 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-defined tools and methods to employ in their projects. Any developer, engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, or user must have a means of proposing one of these standards every time they believe their own achievements might also be applicable to another's progress and success.
The CIP process, documented in the standards CIP-0001 / CIP-9999 and the CIP Wiki, includes:
2 - What will the Proposer do for the CIP process?
The proposer — a co-architect of the CIP process, with 4+ years of experience (since January 2021) 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 original designation as Community Editor, CIP editors mainly provide conceptual and technical review of CIP submissions. Meanwhile, routine attention to the quality and consistency of the CIP repository itself has, for nearly 3 years, been provisioned through the proposer's regular Catalyst funding.
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. Consistent Community Editor funding through Project Catalyst has assured this high availability is now proceeding towards its fourth year.
From the process as defined in CIP-0001 — at first only used by Cardano's original CIP editors and key software architects — the CIP editor team and the proposer's community outreach activities have grown into diverse cooperative processes and educational efforts to:
3 - Why is a robust CIP process especially vital for the next 6 to 12 months?
At the time of this proposal writing, Cardano's relatively new Governance process has just provided on-chain voting approval of critical development proposals whose progression would only have been possible before through traditional corporate decision-making processes.
Not only have CIPs for governance metadata established an effective framework for this representative voting — with a comprehensive vocabulary for votes, representatives, and propositions — we are now heading toward an era where significant evolutionary stages will require CIPs for both:
Most community members are also aware that the classic Cardano Node is now diversifying into a number of other contexts: based on different programming languages (besides the original Haskell) and into other protocols like Hydra and Mithril.
Ensuring each standard remains applicable to Cardano's overall design now requires more active attention from editors aware of these complexities: to maintain, through experience and interest, connections to a network of developers who can provide the vital review in each case to determine that a standard is attractive enough that the whole ecosystem moves together through these technological advances while still maintaining its diversity.
Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community
1a - General impact of CIP process itself
(adapted from the proposer's CIP Wiki article section beginning What general benefits does the CIP process provide to the Cardano ecosystem and 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. Popular appraisals of maturity, documentation, cooperation, compatibility, and future-proofing can be used to redirect huge amounts of capital and developer interest. Therefore the number and quality of standards created by the CIP process keep Cardano itself as a recognised standard in the crypto community as a whole.
CIPs document the best-practice means of production for new applications and provide enterprises with efficiency of development. They offer educational value and consistency to individuals and firms that are moving to Cardano from other blockchains and design models, while supporting open source development for a more cooperative and generative ecosystem.
Except for proprietary dApps and other novel uses of Cardano's basic features, all Cardano's most marketable and sustaining efforts have launched through the CIP process, including: NFTs, wallet interfaces, the Cardano on-chain governance model, and emerging protocol standards for future generations of networking and consensus behaviour.
1b - Proposer's community outreach, public reporting and visibility
The results of community engagement can be seen, for example, in this maintenance update to Cardano's key standards document CIP-0001 which defines the CIP process itself: CIP-0001, CIP-9999, README and templates: periodic update #1044. Readers can verify this addresses several sectors of the ecosystem, spanning different companies and ongoing parallel standards efforts.
The proposer is the editor most likely to respond to community requests for visibility into the CIP process, and is often called upon to establish or debate the accessibility and effectiveness of that process whenever those might be challenged. Though accountability to the public may be important, the vital service of the CIP process and repository is to Cardano developers and architects. A recent example of such a reconciliation with prominent developers can be seen here (proposer writing as @COSDpool): Cardano Forum - Managing a Shared Ledger: New CIP-Like Process?
1c - Proposer's unique focus on documentation
The proposer stands out among past and present CIP editors in commitment to document the CIP process for any interested member 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, or engagement with, the general public.
1d - Proposer's achievement of daily response and high customer service bandwidth
In the earliest 2 years of the CIP process — and, by default, in the latter 2 or 3 years as the original editing team rotated into new editors with full-time positions in newer Cardano agencies or deep commercial involvements — most editors are still mainly engaged around the biweekly CIP meetings: during which new, actively reviewed, and finalised documents are discussed on a voice call.
The character of the CIP process changed about 3 years ago when the proposer committed to responding to these CIP review threads every day on GitHub: on the basis of email notifications automatically sent by the system, as one would have through a trouble ticket system. The proposer's unique commitment to see this as a customer service process has therefore improved the response time over standards issues from biweekly to daily.
This commitment has been assured since late October 2022 through Catalyst funding, and shows in all the KPIs below as well as an ongoing review list (of open Pull Requests) which is clearly documented and actively managed as any other well-supported open source project. The budget for this time expenditure (see section Budget + Costs) also allows time for the proposer to address CIP presentation issues wherever they may be found in the ecosystem (e.g. Relative pathname links still broken, document anchors lost #51).
2a - Proposer's contribution to the CIP process workload
First, please note the regular time allocation through Project Catalyst generally allows the proposer to contribute a greater share of the ongoing upkeep of the CIP repository than other editors, and to interact with authors and reviewers more quickly and regularly.
CIP Editors (and any employer they may have) are all effectively volunteers and therefore there should be no competitive ranking by apparent contribution: each editor's interest and ability to perform the routine work will be driven by interest and circumstance.
Given these reservations, here is a KPI for individual contributions as measured on GitHub (the number of pull requests [repository updates] each current editor has participated in) as of Wed 13 Aug 2025 17:30 UTC (clickable search links):
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 and 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:
2b - Proposer's regular submission of auditable and practically useful reports
The number of documents here may not an ambitious KPI, since even in the best of circumstances there will always be exactly 1 report submitted per month: github.com/rphair/cip-editing
However, curious readers and auditors will also see the value in each linked report itself containing a great number of headings: each with its own links to discussions and resolutions. Voters and reviewers are welcome to observe, and perhaps count, the number of review threads within each report... and to verify that this freely expands each month with the growth of standards submitted into the CIP process and the complexity of the discussions that follow.
(Also significant in this modest KPI is fact that the proposer has never missed a monthly report since the beginning of F9 funding in October 2022.)
2c - Team's regular production of standards
The result of group effort, including the proposer's supported work, keeps producing year on year a consistent stream of new standards documents at 2 to 3 new documents per month (at the time of this writing, there are 118 CIPs and 15 CPSs). This GitHub KPI query will show (at least for the last 2 or 3 years) the rate at which these new documents finally pass review and are merged into the repository:
(all merges into CIP repository except updates, corrections, translations, and administrative changes)
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) or attend regular CIP meetings.
There is no doubt this project can be delivered because the proposer's work has already helped build the foundation of Cardano's body of standards over the last 4 years, with any random look through CIP pull requests showing the proposer's regular and vital support.
Before being funded by Catalyst as of Fund 9, the proposer had already spent 1 year as a unpaid CIP editor, following an initial half-year of being a regular observer at CIP meetings over the course of co-authoring CIP-0013 and then being invited to editor status by founding members.
History of Catalyst funding and related accomplishments (other than documented routine work)
Fund 9 accomplishments (Community CIP Editor: 1 year budget)
Fund 10 completed sub-projects (Community CIP Editor: 1 year budget (continued))
Fund 13 notable achievements (Community CIP Editor Robert Phair: 8 month budget)
Current work, from F9 period ongoing through present time (past end of F13 project): github.com/rphair/cip-editing
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 4 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.
Milestone Title
Months 1-3 of 6
Milestone Outputs
Public links to reports for each of these months, containing proofs of activities described in section Budget + Costs):
Acceptance Criteria
Each monthly report for this period contains detailed summaries and links that Catalyst auditors and community members can use to verify the performance of all Funded activities listed in section Budget + Costs.
Evidence of Completion
All monthly reports for this period are posted at proposer's cip-editing GitHub repository.
Delivery Month
3
Cost
30000
Progress
50 %
Milestone Title
Months 4-5 of 6
Milestone Outputs
Public links to reports for each of these months, containing proofs of activities described in section Budget + Costs):
Acceptance Criteria
Each monthly report for this period contains detailed summaries and links that Catalyst auditors and community members can use to verify the performance of all Funded activities listed in section Budget + Costs.
Evidence of Completion
All monthly reports for this period are posted at proposer's cip-editing GitHub repository.
Delivery Month
5
Cost
20000
Progress
80 %
Milestone Title
Final month 6
Milestone Outputs
Public links to reports for each of these months, containing proofs of activities described in section Budget + Costs):
Final video and report covering accomplishments over entire term of the project.
Acceptance Criteria
Monthly report for this period contains detailed summaries and links that Catalyst auditors and community members can use to verify the performance of all Funded activities listed in section Budget + Costs.
Final video and report are posted according to Project Catalyst specifications.
Evidence of Completion
Monthly report for this period is posted at proposer's cip-editing GitHub repository.
Final video and report are accepted by the Project Catalyst auditors.
Delivery Month
6
Cost
10000
Progress
100 %
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:
The 6 month period for this project will allow better allocation of incoming funds vs. work schedule:
The proposer has been delivering the work in advance of any payment through Fund 14 because of:
2 - Funded activities
For these tasks in greater detail (but without time projections), see the CIP Wiki section written by the proposer: What does a CIP editor do?
Daily GitHub review (1 hour / each day, on average = 14 hours biweekly) - Responding to all CIP postings and to 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.
Spontaneous activities (1 hour / weekday = 10 hours biweekly) - Community outreach, response, discussions and communications; creating and moderating particular channels for developer feedback about common standards interests; interaction with representatives of Cardano companies; creating and resolving issues about the CIP process itself.
Bi-weekly meetings (8 hours biweekly) - Meetings, open to the public with CIP developers from key Cardano projects and companies present, for verbal discussion and visibility to: introduce new standards candidates, review the more challenging items, and finalise acceptance of new CIPs, with time (around meeting days every other Tuesday) roughly breaking down as:
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 (CIP-0001 and CIP-9999), updates as necessary to the CIP Wiki, and automation of GitHub workflow when possible.
Project reporting (2 hours / week = 4 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 final reports required by Project Catalyst itself.
TOTAL time allocation = 14+10+8+4+4 = 40 hours biweekly = 20 hours / week
3 - Time budget for monthly intervals, project total, and equivalent hourly rate
Weekly payment = 120 ada/hour * 20 hours/week = 2400 ada/week
Reference ADA/USD price — last computed @ Mon 11 Aug 2025 11:00 UTC, in latter half of 3-week proposal submission period — as average of high and low so far during that period:
How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?
Justification for proposer's hourly rate
The payment rate of 120 ada/hour — at time of proposal submission, about US $90/hour — is comparable with hourly pay rates for technical project management with operational expertise. On this project it specifically includes:
Justification for proposer's number of hours
By a rough estimate, CIP editing workload has been increasing about 50% every year; in this last year, due to:
The requested time budget of 20 hours per week — compared to 15 hours per week at this time last year — therefore reflects this steady increase in workload but also steady improvements to operational efficiency, record-keeping, and accuracy: the result of the proposer's becoming much faster at the routine tasks of repository maintenance, daily review, and meeting preparation / post-meeting documentation.
Equity value of proposer's work on the CIP process
Other current CIP editors, due to work responsibilities or private business demands, cannot devote time to regular or 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.
Value of decentralised funding = decentralised operations
The ongoing funding of the proposer's Community role on the CIP editing team — which supports the quality and responsiveness of the effort without creating obligations to any particular company — 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 The CIP process is decentralised).
The huge incentive to leverage the standards process, as sometimes seen on other blockchains 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 donated from Intersect, IOG, and private businesses in support of other current CIP editors.
Value relative to bureaucratic proposals
This year of Cardano's governance launch for funding proposals has seen bids of several hundreds of thousands of ada for oversight committees. Allocating an order of magnitude less funding to the CIP process has enabled a decentralised community of developers to provide their own evolutionary oversight: while maintaining 100% community accountability through verifiable reporting and, most importantly, delivering the tangible product of Cardano's standards repository.
Value to Cardano's core agencies
Out of all the essential components of the Cardano ecosystem, the CIP process is the one that receives the least recognition... as agencies like IO and the Cardano Foundation generally only spotlight individual CIPs, and the developers behind them, without acknowledging the process of peer review essential to the promoted legitimacy of these standards.
To date, it has mainly been Catalyst voters, reviewers, and auditors who keep quietly honouring and maintaining support for the CIP process: and therefore it is likely the most decentralised of all Cardano engineering efforts.
The Cardano Foundation itself has benefited abundantly from effectively outsourcing the CIP process to independently funded, self-appointed editors: since the result has been a fully managed repository without any allocation from its own budget. This is therefore another example where Catalyst funding has, through individuals' own interests, organically provided a decentralised means to fulfil the requirements of the community as a whole.
Terms and Conditions:
Yes
GitHub: @rphair
X crypto handle: @COSDpool
Cardano Forum: @COSDpool
Web site: cosd.com
CIP-related qualifications and links:
Cardano general qualifications:
Summary from CV / Resume: