Open Source Dev Ecosystem and Open Standards and Interoperability room (combined)

Video

About the challenges

This breakout room combined two related challenges.

Open Source Developer Ecosystem has a total challenge budget of $1.2M in ADA, and there are 150 ideas posted. The key question of the challenge is: How can we ensure that the Cardano ecosystem is built on a framework which is owned by the community and equally accessible to all?

Open Standards and Interoperability has a challenge budget of $500,000 in ADA, and 36 ideas have been posted. The key question of this challenge is Can we build an Open Ecosystem to drive growth, give equal opportunities to all, and increase the synergies across Cardano projects?

Note: This event took place on 5th March 2022. Some of the proposals mentioned may not have finally been submitted in this funding round.

Summary

0:00 Welcome

0:22 The importance of open source in being able to share and learn and build on each other’s work.

support for SPOs

1:10 Chris: Issue of developers’ concerns about payment if a project is open source. Selecting the right challenge for a proposal that is not entirely open-source, but has open source elements The Matrix network: We are building a VoIP and streaming platform for communities; aiming to get people off unsafe social platforms like Discord, put them in an open source community, all end-to-end encrypted, to get apps built and create interoperability. Somewhere you can actually share; integrated with GitHub and Graphene. We are also building stuff for stakepools. Our ticker is [N2O]; we're up to 84 delegators, almost a half a million ADA in the last two months. So we’re doing well; and we've been open-sourcing that to onboard other SPOs and help them learn how to build it properly, be secure, and host it on their own infrastructure.

4:50 Patrik, Challenge team: This can go straight into Open Source and Open Standards as a proposal – package this documentation as video courses for beginner SPOs.

5:19 Chris: Community funding for people to start their own stakepools. I don't know how many people have really figured it out yet, and are funding the community?

5:36 Patrik, Challenge team: The problem is, until you have certain amounts of ADA delegated, there is no payout, you're losing money, unless you increase in popularity or support through some meaningful idea. [summariser’s note: this is referring to mission-driven stakepools?]

funding to maintain open libraries

6:07 Chris: DApps and Integrations challenge has over 100 proposals; referring proposers to this challenge if their proposals fit it.

6:56 Dan: Open libraries that you use could be funnelled into the Open Source Development challenge.

7:23 Chris: But things move so fast, your library is outdated by the time someone else clicks on it. The issue is keeping it updated.

7:59 Dan: That's what the challenge is for; you can ask for funds to keep it updated and maintained.

the good and bad of Discord

8:22 Unknown Speaker: None of us love Discord, do we?

8:26 Dan: We love and we hate it. We don’t like that it’s centralised, but it’s a powerhouse of features. But we should look for something more sustainable, yes.

Group discussion of Discord functionality

what is quadratic funding?

13:18 Ninh https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/396834 Quadratic Voting Funding in fund 8: I got inspired by a Swarm meeting, and we were going to bring Gitcoin to Cardano [https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/396277, proposal in reserve]; Gitcoin has quadratic funding to power open source projects. Open source is a public good; whoever develops something, it's out there and anyone can use it, for free. Last year alone Gitcoin raised 53 million for open source projects. And they're built on the Ethereum network. I love Catalyst; but I want to be able to get more people involved and more funders involved than just the IOG treasury. If you had a dedicated platform with truly democratic quadratic voting, it doesn't matter how much money you have in your wallet; a million ADA or 100 ADA, you will count. Someone asked me, How about just funding any non-profit projects, any public good, with quadratic voting? So that's what we're doing; and we're building it completely open source, because if we really want to democratise voting and democratise funding sources, and decentralise funding sources for public goods, it also makes sense to make this completely built by the community and owned by the community.

17:43 Dan: Is quadratic funding the same idea as quadratic voting?

17:58 Ninh: Quadratic voting is the mechanism that assigns the same power to every vote. In quadratic funding, you distribute the funding based on that equal vote. In Catalyst right now, if a whale backs your project, that can get you funded; but in the quadratic voting system, if a whale backs your project, that’s only one vote out of many, it doesn't matter if they have a tonne of money in their wallet.

19:10 Patrik, Challenge team: So quadratic voting is everyone’s vote counts the same; quadratic funding is based on quadratic voting, you distribute the funding proportionally.

19:28 Ninh: It's not like if I have 1,000 ADA in my wallet, and I vote for this project, then this project has 1,000 ADA worth of votes; it’s just one vote. And if 100% of the people vote for this project, it will get 100% of the funding.

20:01 Dan: I was under the impression that it's a matter of how early you vote with quadratic voting. So if I have very little, but I vote early, this somehow gives the vote more weight?

20:30 Ninh: It's more about popularity, how many votes you can muster. And it’s the most optimal way to get support for the public good, because it's designed so that the public goods that get the most votes, get the most funding and support. Early support eventually has a network effect in itself, and more people will vote; but ultimately, the result is based on the votes themselves.

21:17 Patrik, Challenge team: In quadratic voting, basically everyone counts one. That makes sense for community owned resources. But I think what we have in Catalyst is basically a stake representation. So people who started investing earlier, they have a higher amount of ADA. I think we probably have to balance “every one is worth one”, and the initial stake, because in a capitalistic system if you remove the fact that somebody has an initial stake, the system falls down, and on the other side, if you remove the fact that everybody is worth the same, the socialistic system falls down. By the way, this is just two philosophies for the operation of a community. I think they should be integrated.

22:46 Ninh: I compare quadratic funding to VC [venture capital] investors. A VC investors’ job is to optimise for return on investment on their money. You don’t see them investing in public goods, because that's not their interest, obviously. And on the other side, is quadratic voting and funding, when communities that benefit most from public goods will get the most engaged, and they will also invest the most.

23:45 Patrik, Challenge team: Discoverability is the problem.

23:49 Dan: The tragedy of the commons.

23:52 Patrik, Challenge team: If there is a very good candidate, strong power can make this candidate unknown to everybody.

24:04 Dan: And you expect the community to have all the information to make a decision that’s – not “correct”, but somehow valuable to the community. This is super difficult, I think; because we've seen, there’s not always a consensus about what we actually need as a community.

the open source community and investing your time

24:33 Patrik, Challenge team: at Eclipse Open Source, it typically was, I see a bug, and I write a bug report – and often the response was “okay, solve it yourself”. I think the open-source community, they use the fact that you invest your time to report, and less try to solve the bug if somebody else is commenting on your bug report. So the bug report itself is like a forum that takes on its own life. And the more content there is in these bug reports, the more people join in, like they’re in a mailing list – you see the name, the company they work for. This is another model; I don't know if you can call it “proof of work”, but basically, you are demonstrating that you are willing to invest your time on it.

25:55 Ninh: Discoverability is always about execution, whether you can execute well. The challenge of getting people into open source, is people not knowing where to start if there's no documentation. But I want to point to GitCoin’s use case. Money brings people. If you have money, people will learn. If you put “hey, here's a 5k bounty on this open source project”, then even if there's no documentation, people figure it out.

26:48 Patrik, Challenge team: I don't agree. If people do nothing to improve the ecosystem, you’ll have a bunch of people living off funding. I think the motivation of the people should generate more return, and then involve other people. Catalyst is funding for hardworking people who really want to spend their time on technical things to improve the community; it’s seed funding to help you to start your own company. The Cardano Foundation, or IOG, wants you to start your own enterprise, become commercially successful, and then go back to them and pay for their services after you become successful. You want motivated people who are willing to invest our time to learn. For instance, in my case, I really want to find somebody to build a basic skeleton of a dApp that can be used by everybody; basically that “Hello World” for a dApp. And then everybody will build in that direction, and make it better, more secure, have more documentation; and it will be something that you can quickly use to spin up projects. That's how, from my point of view, most of the well known open source projects become successful – a simple but well documented initial proof, that was extensible enough to be used in several cases. I can think of Java, Python, I don't know about C++, but when I think of open source, I always go back to the basics and search for people that have motivation, because it's all we need. I don't know Haskell, but I can learn it. And by learning Plutus, I'm learning Haskell, and I become able to build a dApp. If you give me the open source code, I will go at the bottom of the open source code – but only if this is a functional unit of work. And if you give me some open source of a very complex product, like the open source code of Plutus apps – no way a normal developer can understand and work on it. If you give me the open source code of a complex app, Pancake Swap or whatever, no way that I understand how it works. But f you give me that most simple app, then I understand how it works, and from there, I can go farther.

30:48 Ninh: Yeah, makes a lot of sense, Patrik. I think a lot of the Plutus developers will understand; they just don't have time to write the documentation, or are not correctly incentivised to do that.

why documentation matters

31:06 Patrik, Challenge team: My professor at University told me, “Patrik, if you don't write documentation now, you will never write documentation.” And what I observed is, if you don't write documentation, that's not going to be used. It should be really clear what I want – I want that Cardano offers a lot of basic open-source projects that have a basic functional unit of work, that you can take and customise. If we can provide these, and can keep these updated, we can skip from one simple model to another simple model in no time, and our community will be the most successful. It's already successful, but we want better.

31:55 Ninh: So do you think that if someone asks for money to increase documentation..?

32:07 Patrik, Challenge team: Open Source and Open Standards is about that. Not only that, but also about that.

32:15 Ninh: Also consider all the people that that would be willing to fund this outside of IOG.

32:25 Patrik, Challenge team: There were a lot of votes for the Open Source and Open Standards challenge. One of the reasons is because someone showed up in a Cardano Town Hall saying, “Oh, these are very interesting products, thank you...” [laughs] But the other thing is, I think many people are like me: I want to work with Blockchain advanced topics, I need to understand more, but start from the deep stuff. If your reward is high level it’s like you enter a world made of theoretical physicists, and everybody's talking about the gradient of something. Come on, tell me the basic maths! and then we go to the n-dimensional world. So the point is, you want to start small, and always have something working, something that is focusing your attention; and from that, start evolving. You want the basic unit of work, then you have an idea and then try to reach that idea starting from your unit of work. And when you reach it, you have a second unit of work, and you can make it open source. And maybe somebody can say “no, that's not really the perfect way” - but from the second point that you reach, you go to a third point, and if that [the second point you reached] was not really good, maybe we'll have some issues. That's why many people that can contribute on the tree of evolution of ideas, they can be really helpful. Sorry, I'm going a little bit too deep and wasting your time...

34:12 Ninh: No, no, no, it's, it's great. I'm learning a lot. Thank you.

an open source search engine that plants trees!

34:28 Dan: My proposal – I initially wanted to post this https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/397618 in the Miscellaneous challenge. And then I talked with Patrik, who urged me to publish it in the Open Source Developer Ecosystem challenge, because the main mechanism or main parts that we're developing is a search engine that should be open source, for other people to use as a kind of funding mechanism. So there's this Ecosia search engine, it's a German company, and all the profits they make from the clicks, through advertisements and stuff, they use to plant trees. So the idea is to create an open source search engine, because Ecosia are somewhat open source, but the search engine itself is not really open source; they have an iOS browser that is open source, but all the other stuff is really not.

36:06 Patrik, Challenge team: Open source does not mean GPL (General Public Licence). If you say GPL, everybody is going to be scared of open source. Maybe there is something that you want to share, but also get from the community. What I see from your proposal, first of all, you are asking really little funding. Because it's in [the] Open Source [challenge], which has $1.2 million [total fund budget], and you're asking $16,000 – that's minimal compared to the extent of the challenge. You can be more ambitious, step number one. Step number two, I was looking at your proposal, and it looks interesting....

36:47 Dan: It's not yet fully completed; the roadmap is still missing. But I had the budget in; I will add the calculation for setting up facilities, and some more information about the positive impacts of algae on the human body. There’s stuff missing, but the basic framework is in there. So I’ll try to get feedback; and ideally, also find a developer, because without the developer this doesn't make sense. We had a developer until two months ago, but he was offered a job. So this is his calculation and estimations that are posted in the proposal.

37:34 Patrik, Challenge team: You could try to do it yourself, via following the Plutus Pioneers programme, but it takes a lot of time.

How to stay in contact with the Challenge Team: Discord channel.

how to budget a proposal

40:03 For your proposal, remember, it's super important to find other people. And like I said, you can be more ambitious; you can ask up to 20% of the fund. 1.2 million means 440k per proposal.

40:50 Dan: But it doesn't make sense to ask for more money if there's no... It has to be reasonable.

40:58 Patrik, Challenge team: It’s up to the community. You know how you should be paid; but also consider, if you want to pay a Plutus developer, they tend to be expensive.

41:21 Dan: The budget is without any ledger integration; so there's no explicit need for a Plutus developer. I could draw up another estimation with ledger integration.

41:41 Patrik, Challenge team: General points on how to write a proposal: read the challenge carefully, and write how your proposal is addressing it, including the challenge scope; how it is going to be measured; and what will be the impact. These are the most important things. And on average, if you get 4.5 stars, that means it is a good idea. People probably are going to vote it and you most likely are going to be funded.

Ends: 42:52