Open Source Development Ecosystem

We need to grow an entire ecosystem of experts to build and maintain the foundations of Cardano/Catalyst together with the current IOG teams

A growing number of experts join forces to build collaboratively on community owned infrastructure, tooling, standards, libraries and docs

- increase the number and the quality of Cardano Open Source projects

- increase the number of contributors

- increase of open source tools and frameworks from the community for the community (dog-fooding)

Context

In the first iterations, Catalyst started as a Challenge proposed by the Catalyst team. Initially, the majority of its budget was destined to the Developer Ecosystem. For instance, in Fund 6, the Developer Ecosystem was assigned 1 mil. USD, that was 25% of the total 4 mil. available for the Fund.

In Fund 7, Catalyst released control of the budget to the community, which was able to choose the destination of the funding through voting. Unfortunately, the Developer Ecosystem challenge proposed for F7 was rejected because it did not receive enough votes. This led to the lack of an important resource stream that could have been used for the development of the Cardano technology.

The Open Source Development Ecosystem Challenge

The OSDE challenge aims to provide a stream of resources to teams that want to develop their projects and contribute back to the community by sharing part of their efforts in terms of open source projects, open-source frameworks, and accessible knowledge.

The main idea is that projects funded by the community can both generate business value retained by the teams, and at the same time contribute back to the community by improving the ecosystem itself.

For example, a team can be funded to develop a project; generate business value by leveraging a profitable idea, and share the non-core-business part of their work in terms of shared knowledge or in terms of building frameworks or projects with other teams - such that is possible to solve complex problems by joining minds and dividing the efforts across different teams.

Motivation

Catalyst exists to gradually work towards the final stage of the roadmap of Cardano: Voltaire. We are building tools to support new forms of governance and collaboration, on top of technology that is still being developed. The development of this technology itself, in the end, will have to become part of this same process as well. Such a complex and daunting task requires experts from a variety of disciplines to work together with a common goal.

Guiding questions:

• How can we ensure future efforts benefit from the work that is funded today?
• How do we align between different open source community efforts?
• What are the next steps to fuse IOG development with the community?
• How can we encourage experts to collaborate and share their knowledge and work?
• How can we develop a sustainable ecosystem while sharing knowledge and efforts?

Possible directions:

• Education for development in the Cardano & Catalyst ecosystem
• Developing common tools, frameworks, core infrastructures, or proof of concepts
• Incentive systems for development & hosting
• Common audited repositories & overviews of existing solutions
• Organizing events to bring the development ecosystem together
• Collaboration to improve interoperability within the ecosystem 

Note

For a challenge with this budget and these aspirations, it is essential to have a broad consensus. If that support is present, then the results will be owned by the same ecosystem that supports its development. 

Complimentary Challenges

This challenge is about growing the open-source ecosystem by funding and improving projects that should share part of their efforts to make the ecosystem grow, and it is not to be confused with:

• The Developer Ecosystem Challenge [1 mil](https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Developer-Ecosystem/384822-48088) that focus on developer ecosystem not necessarily open source.
• The Open Standards & Interoperability Challenge [500k](https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Open-Standards-Interoperability/383619-48088) that aims to establish standards, processes, and foster interoperability. 

We have aligned our efforts with these other challenges and aligned our budgets. We feel there is space for all three. Many open source projects start out as closed source and many contributors to open source projects started out as people using the open source as part of their own private project. We feel that having both is would lead to the best of both worlds. Splitting the challenge helps create a less competitive environment for the Open Source projects.