Incentive system for documentation

Create a bounty-based smart contract to incentivize developers to write quality open source documentation for Cardano.

Team of blockchain enthusiasts with background in fullstack engineering and political science w/ experience in infrastructure-focused devops

The starting proposition of this project is our firm belief in the value of Cardano as a secure, sustainable and transparent blockchain platform with incredible potential for scalability and resilience. As Project Catalyst recognizes, the fulfillment of this potential depends on all existing and new members of the Cardano community and our work in development, entrepreneurship and education.
In order to facilitate such efforts, particularly in the area of development, the most important question we need to ask is how to make it easier for developers to build on top of Cardano. This is the question at the heart of our project. Our answer is a smart contract-based framework to incentivize documentation.
Currently, developers have no incentives to write documentation from a personal point of view. However, the benefits of a rich documentation database are exponential from a community and systemic point of view. Our framework proposes a bounty-based incentive system that will not only contribute to the richness of documentation, but it will strengthen the existing ecosystem by utilizing the ada currency as a reward.
In specific, we plan to create (a series of) smart contract that will receive relevant datum from GitHub Actions. Each developer who commits their name and wallet address will receive a bounty reward in ada conditional on the successful completion of the documentation and a peer review process of its quality.
The goal of this framework is to encourage developers to create quality documentation for their Cardano projects in the next four to eight months. While we hope that the framework can continue to serve as an incentive structure in the long run, the early stages of the project implementation will be crucial with view to the establishment of a strong foundational community-based, open-source documentation base.
We are convinced of the importance of a community documentation base as a way to make Cardano development easier for existing members of the developer community on the one hand, and more accessible to newcomers on the other.
In line with this, we have already developed a prototype and we are ready to launch the project with full functionality in two months as Plutus reaches the main net. In the next six months following the launch, we will focus on the growth of community documentation by issuing up to 50 bounties per month, and we expect 20 successfully completed and peer reviewed open-source documentation in the first month. We plan to finance the bounty rewards for the initial six-month period of the framework through Project Catalyst, and this constitutes the main expense for this project reflected in the requested funds. However, in the long run, we hope to continue running the project and delivering value for the entire Cardano community through voluntary donations and partnerships with stake pools to finance bounty rewards.

We strongly believe that our incentive structure for documentation will advance the Cardano developer ecosystem and enhance the value of Cardano for everyone. We thank everybody for your feedback and we hope to see your continued support for this project in the future.