ADAO Open Source Development

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Any awarded funds will be sent directly from Catalyst to the ADAO Community Foundation treasury. (secured by a 6 of 9 RoundTable multi-sig account)

Funds will be directed through the internal proposal process within ADAO and used to further incentivize contributions from members of the ADAO Community and the greater Cardano community to the many open source efforts and repositories that are currently on going and managed by ADAO. Hybrid bounties and incentive structures will be explored and deployed in order to spur new and exciting open source initiatives focused on progressing and enabling decentralized communities to flourish on Cardano.

Over the past eight months ADAO has experimented with and successfully deployed a large number of open source bounties, incentivized solely by the ADAO Community Governance Token.

(ADAO v2 Gov. Token" polociy:5b01968867e13432afaa2f814e1d15e332d6cd0aa77e350972b0967d)

This refers to the ADAO v2 Governance token and the Plutus policy on Cardano Mainnet that secures it. This is also the main ADAO treasury.

These incentivized bounties have produced an extensive collection of open source repositories and dapps that can be found in the ADAO community GitHub. Much of this work can be seen in practice today within ADAO as well as many other Cardano projects.

ADAO works closely with a growing number of other Cardano ecosystem developers and projects to ensure a wide range of usability for the tools and applications being developed. Interoperability is a main focus point when developing open source applications yet it is hard for other teams to see immediate value in this approach. ADAO is working with the Blockchain Learning center, SCAT DAO, Lido Nation, Genius Academy and hopes to work with many others to continue creating, iterating and educating on sustainable open source business models.

With these incentives in place we can more effectively encourage other ecosystem developers to work together and advance open source tooling for Cardano DAOs.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

A great majority of the open source development from within ADAO has been focused on enabling DAOs and decentralized coordination solutions for Cardano projects and protocols. ADAO's ability to attract talent, gain feedback and execute, on the specific tools and infrastructure most necessary for the ecosystem of DAOs to flourish is becoming apparent with tools like RoundTable, an Open source multi-sig dapp that leverages gun for decentralized coordination, or Agora, ADAOs collaboration with Liqwid Labs to build out the foundational set of Plutus contracts for Cardano based DAOs. Both of these resources can be seen today in the ADAO Community GitHub and in use throughout the Cardano community.

With these modular foundational tool sets, like RoundTable and Agora, we can now start to build out unique governance models and experiment with hybrid solutions never before possible on Cardano.

ADAO will use part of this funding to deploy novel incentive structures around ADA, ADAO governance, governance of other organizations and community credentials and reputation to continue incentivizing more developers, and development groups to contribute to these open source efforts.

More applications like RoundTable are the goal!

versatile tools that leverage the power of Cardano layer1 and the ecosystem built on top of it yet are intuitive enough for even the non-developer to use and understand.

More recently, ADAOs open source efforts have garnered the interest of other Cardano development communities looking to contribute to and build novel, experiential governance models on top of the open source infrastructure of Agora. These communities of developers will now be able to receive reward bounties as compensation for their contributions and at the same time be incentivized to collaborate with other teams in the ecosystem.

Incentivizing open source collaboration, especially in the early stags of tech., drastically boots both developer and user adoption.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

The most immediate risks to this project include funding and incentives for developers and non-developer contributors.

Lack of education around open source profitability and business models -

Although proven sustainable models exist, education around profitable open source business models are still for the most part unknown. One additional goal for this project and the wider open source community that is ADAO, is to develop examples and educate on these open source business models.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Existing open source repositories in https://github.com/ADAOcommunity have already been linked to successful bounties and new repositories can be proposed at anytime by anyone.

At time of writing there are 18 listed contributors to the ADAO GitHub and hundreds of forks from the over 30 open source repos.

Goals for this quarter include doubling the number of listed contributors to the GitHub and doubling the number of forked repos.

We also plan to continue building stronger bridges and relationships with other organizations to collaborate on cross organizational bounties that can have immediate benefits on a large number of Cardano projects.

GitHub project with easy to follow documentation and near 24hr support in the ADAO discord server will be set up for each project.

General meetings are hosted in the ADAO discord server twice weekly with break out meeting for working groups taking place throughout the week.

Each individual working group uses bi-weekly meetings to update the wider DAO, get feedback, and complete objectives.

ADAO meetings are open to all server members and an events schedule is posted to the top of the server.

Goals for Q4: In Q4 ADAO plans to refine, build documentation around, and educate on the open source relationship between for-profit organizations (like Summon) and the ADAO Community. As an on-chain, open source entity ADAO can receive grants towards open source public goods initiatives and use community wide governance to efficiently direct resources towards the most useful and necessary products, tools, and infrastructure that all DAOs on Cardano need. These rapid and effective funding/bounty systems are open source and modular, we are now starting to work with other organizations to collaborate on and incentivize additional systems like Quadratic voting, reputation based voting and more, to be built on top of the existing infrastructure which is code complete and open sourced in the ADAO GitHub. In Q4 we hope to see these efforts return substantial benefits for Cardano based DAOs in the form of developer resources and more user friendly applications for contributors and participants.

Some of the specific cross collaboration efforts we are currently working on with other Cardano organizations include:

• Plutus multi-signature (offers more flexibility, customizability and upgradability from Native Script multi-sig)

• Advanced governance models (Going beyond just "token voting". ADAO is in talks and actively working with other development teams to implement advanced governance models (like quadratic & reputation) to insure compatibility with existing infrastructure like Agora)

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Exact details and timelines for software and blockchain development projects are extremely difficult to predict and it is not an exact science. Any funds awarded to this proposal will be sent directly from Catalyst to the ADAO foundation treasury, on-chain. Any funds "paid out" for work that has or has not been outlined in this proposal will be requested through the ADAO Community bounty system, and paid out retroactively. Below is an educated breakdown on the technical hours going into this proposal based on previous experiences developing RoundTable and similar products.

Breakdown based on technical hours:

Setting up GitHub project and contributor flows/documentation - 80

Technical documentation and developer content - 100

on-chain development (Validation code/smart contracts - 100

off-chain development (Integration) - 200

Collaborative research (vital for integration with other dapps/marketplaces) - 200

General testing - 100

open source auditing - 100

Technical Specification - 80

Community outreach, workshops, and education - 200

Miscellanies unforeseen tech. and development issues - 40

Total development hours = ~1200 = 800 @ 75per., 400 @ 40per. = 76000

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Siegfried (@sigilthesig) is a full stack developer and full time ADAO contributor. His recent and most noticeable accomplishments include, leading the development and deployment of the "RoundTable" multi-sig dapp, contributions to the CLS, CML, and other Cardano tx libraries as well as contributions to other open source Cardano community repositories.

Adam Rusch holds a PhD from the University of Illinois in Education Policy where he works as a Lecturer in Information Sciences and eLearning Specialist. He is the founder of the Immutable Research Institute and organizer of the Champaign Blockchain meetup group with a passion for cryptocurrency education and public policy.

dzCodes is a professional problem solver who started as a potential web designer/frontend developer around seven years ago but quickly moved through the frontend to the backend. He is currently contributing full time to ADAO and other open-source and blockchain projects.

Riley attended the University of Washington for Computer Science and Mathematics with a strong interest in applied mathematics, blockchains, and AI. He left his job writing software used by over 75% of Fortune 500 companies and working hard to shift away from a 9-5 career. He is now an active contributor to various open source repositories maintained by organizations such as ADAO, Mlabs, and Liqwid Labs.

Nicolas Cerny (Lovecoach) is currently working as Business Analyst focused on requirements engineering and project management. His aim is to establish proper workflows and organizational structure for ADAO. He is passionate about decentralized governance and all things crypto.

Adaminnow (TCT) has over six years of experience in Decentralized Finance and DAO governance as a researcher, builder and practitioner. His latest achievements include Co-founding and team building within the ADAO Community and the Summon Platform.

Tommy (@Tommycrypto) has served ADAO as one of the main Working Group leads responsible for organizing tasks related to education and the vision of the DAO. He believes in the ethos of decentralization with a focus on the effective application of the Cardano blockchain as a financial and social operating system.

Allusian: With over 14 years of experience in Customer Service, Allusian has served as a Core Contributor to ADAO since October of ‘21. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Texas, and has over a decade of experience in roles as a public servant in Texas and Washington State.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Yes, ADAO plans to continue building open source for the Cardano ecosystem and will continue to incentivize other projects and teams to do the same.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

ADAOs auditability is enhanced by its open source nature. All ADAO meetings are held in the discord server and open for anyone to join.

Other auditable KPIs--

• Open source ADAO Community GitHub projects/repositories

• GitHub commits to ADAO Community repositories

• Number of recurring contributors to ADAO Community GitHub repositories

• Number of new contributors to ADAO Community repositories

• Number of forks of ADAO Community repositories

• Number of proposal/bounty submissions to ADAO Community from internal ADAO specific working groups

• Number of proposal/bounty submissions to ADAO Community from new, first time contributors

• Number of proposal/bounty submissions to ADAO Community from other "outside" organizations

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Success for this proposal would show at least a 2 times increase to the number of ADAO open source projects within the ADAO Community GitHub and at least a 10 times increase in bounties submitted to ADAO, both from internal working groups as well as from other development groups focused on DAO tooling or decentralized infrastructure for Cardano. Other indicators of success should be visible by the number of on-chain entities operating on Cardano using open source applications to secure and adjust treasuries, protocol parameters, and coordinate on-chain.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This Proposal although not directly related to past ADAO proposals will have an effect on all the open source efforts within the ADAO Community as well as other open source organizations.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

We believe that Cardano is inherently aligned with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) because it empowers every individual to make a difference in their community and the world. In particular, this project helps encourage Decent Work and Economic Growth by opening up new ways for individuals to collaborate together.