Please describe your proposed solution.
Background: What are CIP's, why do we need them, and how is the author involved?
Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs) follow the standard of other blockchains (e.g. EIPs or Ethereum Internet Proposals) to allow developers, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, or any user to propose standards, processes, or information documents that the rest of the community can follow: to avoid producing the same resources or methods repeatedly, so errors and miscommunications are kept to a minimum as the blockchain increases in size & complexity.
The CIP Editor group was born under the oversight of the Cardano Foundation with the publication of CIP-0001, in which the original CIP editors outlined a process for posting, editing and approving these suggested standards according to open-source procedures: with a GitHub repository which can be "forked" to create new CIP documents and modify existing ones.
Current CIP editors are those with write permission to this repository. Though all original members of this group were employees of the official Cardano sponsoring companies (IOG, Emurgo, and the Cardano Foundation), in keeping with open source tradition (and to support impartial governance) the members have looked for membership outside those companies. I was the first of these "community" editors to be added (in Q3 2021) and so far (in June 2022) the only one.
Perception of problem: How is the CIP process doing, and where is it going?
There has been a workable division of labour in this group, with community acknowledgement of an effective process with a growing body of standards material… but the workload on all members has been increasing. Two of the currently active members are highly technical architects of Cardano with multiple job roles within their own companies, and have found that CIP duties have taken an increasing amount of their professional time.
My own role on the editing team has been focused more on community outreach, advocacy, and documentation, and I have observed the same thing, as the rate of new CIPs and CIP changes increases geometrically while the number of editors remains fixed. We are all at the point where standards of both recruitment and remuneration are needed to keep to a high standard of work that the community can depend upon.
Short term solution: Payment for uncompensated editors (remuneration)
A successful Catalyst proposal from the last funding round was a first step in solving this problem:
F8: Open Standards & Interoperability > CIP Editor time Sebastien for 1 year
… which establishes a tentative precedent and budget based on the expectations and outlook of a CIP editor already working full-time in a Cardano related company.
Since my own proposal is from the point of view of an editor with no company affiliation, securing funding would ensure that anyone with skills and passion to support Cardano standards will be able contribute fully to the growing CIP process, regardless of their employment status.
From both perspectives: during the period in which they are funded, editors will be free to allocate their time exclusively to CIP editing responsibilities. This will quickly reflect in the time & difficulty that CIP authors face: a factor that can be easily measured by the community through the CIP repository on GitHub.
Long term solution: Recruitment & retention of new editors
This part of the strategy is beyond the scope of this proposal, although if a standard for remuneration is developed in the short term, it will incentivise the community to produce and validate new, committed editors from a variety of sources.
Paying these editors through Project Catalyst would also help ensure this part of the Governance process becomes more decentralised, and remains so, by avoiding the potential conflicts of interest that might result from the Cardano Foundation paying editors directly to manage its own repository.
Who benefits?
Anyone who derives value from Cardano remaining an open-source blockchain, whose standards can evolve in a decentralised manner not dependent on any company in particular. The evolution of the Internet and the emergence of blockchain have shown us that open source standards in both design and governance lead to:
- higher & more sustainable asset values
- more & better related business propositions
- resilience & longevity resulting from decentralised governance
- increased adoption relative to other blockchains (which leads to our Challenge question)
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
The particular goal for this Challenge is to increase the number of projects that migrate from Ethereum to Cardano. Many Cardano Improvement Proposals, especially recent ones, have shown:
> An efficient open source standards process in Cardano will facilitate businesses & developers in Ethereum dominated market sectors to develop on Cardano as well as, or instead of, Ethereum.
Challenge: can the Cardano standards process be made more efficient?
Ethereum has a significant head start on Cardano in the development of a standards process: about 4½ years, as measured by the GitHub submission dates of the first EIP before the first CIP. This extra experience has led to a well-developed standards process for Ethereum with high expectations of community governance.
Official lists of finalised proposals, Cardano vs. Ethereum:
- Cardano CIPs: currently 42
- Ethereum EIPs: currently 458
Roughly speaking, Cardano is inviting all Ethereum's business while maintaining less than ⅒ of Ethereum's standards infrastructure. Note this is a very rough estimate because, for instance, there tend to be more deprecated proposals with time; the difference in numbers only serves to illustrate the expectations of a project migrating from Ethereum which will depend somehow on the prior work of others… as most of them will.
There are other metrics, easily linked from GitHub and counted, which support roughly the same conclusion:
- the number of unmerged "pull requests" (requests to merge a changed or new standards document)
- the number of unresolved "issues" (queries or problem reports)
… of Cardano vs. Ethereum. Project reviewers should feel free to request these metrics in comments, though I believe this detail is less meaningful than the subjective conclusion that Cardano's backlog of standards work is increasing.
This is an excellent opportunity for Cardano to encompass the same body of standards as already covered by Ethereum: if only those growing queues can be kept to a minimum relative to the size of the whole. Avoiding bottlenecks and delays in our open standards (CIP) process will also encourage new types of applications to be documented there whenever possible.
Challenge: would a better utilised Cardano standards process support more market sectors?
As a case to consider this, from the above list of CIPs we can see the standards supporting Cardano NFTs were developed relatively early (CIP-0025, CIP-0027). Today the number of NFT businesses basing on Cardano is impressive compared to other blockchains including Ethereum.
It's a question for the reader to decide if these CIP "standards" (voluntarily adopted) have created the NFT market, when literally it's also true the other way around: that the market has created these standards. The overall truth is that a growing open-source, less centralised industry needs both standards and applications to grow together.
Conclusion: Any improvements in the Cardano standards process will lead to better Cardano Cardano adoption.
Our CIP editing process is improvised, as it was in the early days of Ethereum, but now that Cardano has also become a mature blockchain with many commercial applications, those applications are creating a workload of standards and governance for which Cardano has had little time to evolve an infrastructure.
All users of, developers on, and investors in Cardano must therefore place a high value on our standards framework every time we measure ourselves relative to the "competition" of Ethereum. Documented standards are as much a part of Cardano's overall infrastructure as nodes, networks and transactions… ultimately these help determine cost, ease of use, developer friendliness, and the quality of working in a supportive community.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
The "risk" of this project will be low because, if I were not performing my duties as a CIP editor, it would be apparent to all other editors well within a month's time. Since I understand the audit cycle of Project Catalyst is also monthly, this would leave adequate time for auditors to note my non-performance and cancel the project; and if payments were also made monthly, this would lave little or no risk to Catalyst of payment for undelivered work.
If I were to suddenly quit as a CIP editor, were dismissed from that role, or became unfit for the role, the observed effect in the worst case would be the same:
- My absence would be first noticed by other members of the CIP Editing team, who each look for all other members at each of our bi-weekly CIP meetings unless already excused in advance.
- A prolonged unjustified absence would be noted in the BiweeklyMeetings minutes folder (easily audited by Catalyst) and then, if I were still unreachable, would be confirmed by my failure to produce a monthly report.
- At that point if I could not respond within a reasonable time period with a reason for the absence or omission, I would expect that the relationship with Catalyst would be considered terminated.