gimbalabs-building network capacity

Support experienced developers who are new to blockchain by building tools, creating educational resources, and cultivating project teams.

3 gimbalabs co-founders (James, Roberto, Juliane)

We are Gimbalabs (www.gimbalabs.com), and since launching our project during Catalyst Fund 2, our aspirations have not changed. Our mission is to mobilize everyone in the Cardano community by creating tools and real-world use cases that ignite the public imagination and facilitate adoption. We envision a world where as many people as possible are empowered to solve problems using the Cardano platform.

You can see our funded Fund 2 proposal here: https://gimbalabs.com/fund2.pdf. Over the last months, we've had the opportunity to implement what we promised and test our ideas. We have seen how Dandelion APIs support developers, leading to new collaborations. We have engaged with over 30 new and experienced developers, who are learning about Cardano, tinkering with tools, and already launching collaborative projects. Now our focus turns to the organizational structure of our growing network.

Fund 6 focus: developer experience and bridging to real world application

Each day, we connect with developers, entrepreneurs, and Cardano enthusiasts who want to build on Cardano. We are piloting intro development courses, creating collaborative structures that support new leaders to emerge, and testing processes for establishing teams.

Based on what we've experienced and feedback received from our work over the last eight weeks, we know that refining our organizational structure is essential. We must provide clarity about what Gimbalabs is, and the opportunities it provides. This Fund 6 proposal sharpens our focus through the lens of the developer experience. Over the next three months, we will continue to share tools and learning resources across the Cardano community, with a special focus on contributing to Catalyst, namely a project pipeline that drives the creation of new proposals, facilitates the formation of teams, and expands the Gimbalabs open-source toolbox for developers.

HOW we build future network developer capacity

Our value proposition is to provide a unique developer experience through meaningful engagement with the Cardano ecosystem. We want to make sure that developers identify a space that provides opportunities to learn, tinker (incubate ideas) as well as participate (engaging in real projects). In detail this developer experience journey comprises the following:

1: Experimentation with both software and collaboration processes, allowing developers to start learning, to bring in ideas and to get help incubating projects. We want developers to explore as well as to participate and commit to a defined project by creating applications that help solve problems and address business needs or opportunities.

Developer training: the next round of Cardano Starter Kits are developer-focused and are rolling out presently. We are taking what we've learned by piloting "Intro to Development" and by gathering experienced developers who are new to Cardano.

Gimbalabs Initiatives: We are running a series of experiments in how to build flexible teams that can achieve specific goals. These "mini-projects" are helping to cultivate additional leaders within the Gimbalabs community, as well providing ways for devs and non-devs to collaborate.

Gimbalabs Playground: The success of the experiments listed above can be judged by the number of developers we've helped to engage with Cardano, and we are happy to report that devs are showing up. One of our key priorities over the next few months is to team up with these developers to launch a series of "Playground" projects: open-source tools that pave the way for real-world utility. The first such project is underway, and we're looking forward to sharing more over the next few weeks.

With these formats we foster engagement among developers and create a direct impact on their knowledge, capability creation as well as forming teams to engage in more complex ventures where multi-disciplinarity is required, such as: infrastructure, front-end, back-end, UX design and agile project management.

2: Open-source toolbox for Developers allows ownership of infrastructure, facilitates access and leverage on any tools to explore ideas truly. Our toolbox is always evolving through those tools that were/will be created during the experimentation process mentioned above.

Cardano APIs as Community Service (aka Dandelions): serve as entry-points for developers by offering open, free hosted vanilla flavour of currently available Cardano interfaces for new adopters to explore ideas and launch proofs of concept for new projects. These public, free services will ease adoption of Cardano by providing infrastructure for initial setup and testing of ideas, therefore encouraging developers to start building by reducing the time invested from days to minutes.

Startup OSS deployments: We aim to maximize autonomy by hosting our own instances of OpenSource services when possible (and we'll use hosted OSS when it's not so we also directly support their projects) and we'd like to facilitate this task so that anyone who wants to host their own "dandelions" is supported to do so.

Gimbalabs Playground: Everything we create in our playground experiments (as described above) will become part of the open-source toolbox hosted at gimbalabs.com.

3: Cardano Starter Kits (CSKs) apply principles of Project Based Learning in order to build capabilities required to take the next step to become a Cardano Developer. Over the next 6-12 months, we will roll out CSKs that put Cardano in the hands of the general public. In order to achieve this, our focus for the next 3 months is developer onboarding. The CSKs rolling out presently will therefore be developer-focused, with entry-points and next steps for anyone learning to code, and quick overviews of where to start for experienced developers.

4: The Gimbalabs platform will consolidate all mentioned above in one single source, with the aim to offer the needed space to developers to start the Cardano journey. We have the objective to create an engaged and committed network of developers that is known as a place to go to where true experimentation is taking place.

Gimbalabs provides an opportunity to expose developers' work and talent profile as being a part of a decentralized consulting team. It also provides start-ups, Catalyst proposal teams, companies and institutions with the tools and support they need to build upon Cardano.

Beyond the developer experience: Gimbalabs path to a self-sustaining DAO

With this proposal, we focus on the next three months of intensive developer training and resource creation. Our pathway to long-term sustainability is unchanged. We conclude that this developer experience will enable a revenue driven business by providing consulting through a decentralized pool of talented builders and skillful leaders, equipped to help companies and institutions to build on Cardano. This might start by providing a customized workshop to introduce to the Cardano blockchain, guide a process of incubation and exploring, to implement a defined application including educational marketing to accompany the go-to-market strategy.

In summary we have explored the idea that Gimbalabs might be a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). The "decentralized" part is a work in progress, and we prioritize the autonomy of everyone who contributes to projects. Over the next three months, our work will focus on the "organization" part: how can we provide enough structure so that everyone feels a sense of clarity about what Gimbalabs is and how it works, while also maintaining a high level of decentralized autonomy?

The Gimbalabs Leadership Team

As the core leadership team of Gimbalabs, we are creating synergies across our competencies by delivering within our roles and contributing big ideas to shared outcomes. We aim to keep building a team that demonstrates the value of sustainable, thoughtful work in the discovery of creative solutions. Our team:

James Dunseith

Teacher, coach, and facilitator with a passion for helping people gain agency in problem solving.

James creates learning experiences by running development courses, creating asynchronous learning resources, and helping to launch experiments that allow people to contribute their diverse talent to share goals. He is also the front-end developer of gimbalabs.com and is working to create resilient, reusable components that help other people to launch their work.

Relevant Experience: diverse experience in creating systems and tools that support students and teachers to learn by doing. During his 11 years teaching high school math, computer science, creative writing, and bike repair, James experimented successfully with project-based learning and mastery-based grading, showing how systems like these can change the way students approach learning. He was named a Master Teacher by both Math for America and by BetterLesson, where he published two math curricula that are still in use today. Before founding Gimbalabs, James focused on teacher training at BetterLesson and then at MIND Research Institute, in both cases building successful programs while supporting teachers to use new tools facilitate deeper learning, and is excited to apply lessons from those experiences to the project of sharing Cardano with the world.

Roberto C. Morano

Seasoned sysadmin and DevOps advocate and also an OpenSource-everything and decentralization enthusiast.

Roberto builds tools and facilitates their use by ensuring the stability of Dandelion APIs and being ready to answer all questions. He is involved in Cardano projects and testnets development to operate, maintain and support the APIs offered to the community. He will also help with integrating services and pipelines for Gimbalabs and architecting a potential decentralized API solution that helps fund the organization.

In addition, he will collaborate to provide for the entire continuum of lower-tech to higher-tech use cases. Roberto will ensure that the technical side of CSKs is both fundamentally sound and accessible.

Relevant Experience: Roberto has been involved for more than 10 years in projects that vary from developing Linux distributions for the Spanish citizen and governments, an anti-DDoS systems for a datacenter or web infrastructure for different industries like real estate, logistics or fintech private sector, where he worked on projects for important customers.

As an early Cardano adopter and supporter, he has been part of Emurgo's infrastructure team behind Yoroi Wallet and Seiza explorer. Nowadays, he is the operator for La RepsistancE's PEACE stakepool, whose mission is to drive Cardano adoption with full decentralization in mind.

Juliane Montag

Expert business developer and marketing professional within the consulting sector, stakeholder management and relationship building from start-ups to large corporations.

Juliane's role is focused on driving the business model for Gimbalabs defining value creation and processes to deliver on the value proposition to both developers and clients. Marketing around developers and how to best address needs and accompany a unique experience is one of the key tasks to be fulfilled under this proposal. She will lead overarching project management and stakeholder engagement, as well as work with the accelerator to prepare Gimbalabs to become a sustainable business.

Relevant experience: Juliane's personal motivation is to support clients, business leaders, family business owners and board members on their top of mind issues and offer open discussion and guidance to create long term value, truly holistically. Juliane brings a rich variety of experience, having led national-scale entrepreneurial initiatives, facilitated strategic planning for digital scaling, and provided guidance for small, family-owned businesses. Her client-facing roles have been centered mainly in Business Development & Sales by serving middle-market, family business, and large corporate organizations. In 15+ years' experience Juliane has held diverse management positions for Business Development, Stakeholder Management, Strategic Planning, Business Intelligence and Global Account Management, working with diverse teams in North & South America and Europe.

Roadmap, metrics and budget (3 months)

We are budgeting for three months in regards to our value proposition outlined above. Further, time will be invested in Developer research, engaging with business and setting up the basis for future consulting DAO. 

Roadmap

Development of experimentations outlined above

Development of open-source toolbox outlined above

Establish contribution (developers & community) rewarding framework and application

6-12 months see section on "Beyond the developer experience: Gimbalabs path to a self-sustaining DAO"

Metrics

# of developers onboarded: 40

# of dapps created: 2

# of solutions implemented for real world problems: 2

# of tools created: 3

Budget (3 months)

For 3 core team members: 27.000

Operational (infrastructure, web hosting, servers): 350 USD

Total: 27,350