OSDE: Open Source Dev Ecosystem

We need to grow an ecosystem of experts that can build & maintain the foundations of Cardano in synergy with existing commercial companies.

A growing number of experts join the ecosystem in building new projects and maintaining the foundations of Cardano projects.

• Increase number and quality of the Open Source projects
• Increase number of contributors
• Increase the number of Open Source tools and frameworks from the community for the community (dog-fooding)

Since Fund 6, 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.

Core Idea

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 and leverage the increase of knowledge in the community.

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

Notes

• This is a continuation of the F8:OSDE Challenge
• 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.