Please describe your proposed solution.
The Mesh team aims to provide the most comprehensive and easy-to-use SDK for practical dApp development on Cardano, accessible to new and experienced developers alike, with a complete and high-quality set of documentation and supporting resources. With this proposal we are applying for funding to be able to sustainably maintain and continue to improve the MeshJS projects. The requested funds will enable not only the continued development, but also guarantee additional operational processes can be covered, thus allowing the team to widen and increase community engagements and to engage and level up an active open source developer community at MeshJS.
The Proposal targets two main domains of activities:
1) Core Operations
Core Development
Mesh is dedicated to creating the best and most accessible open-source tools and libraries. Feedback from developers has shown us that among their top priorities are fixing bugs in the codebase and some technical features. All of these involve time-consuming (and not always fun) efforts: fixing the bugs themselves can be laborious and difficult, but also just reading through and responding to PR’s (“Pull Requests'' - code adjustment proposals on Github), improving & updating code, creating and updating documentation, tutorials and other supporting materials. As you can see, there is a significant amount of continuous work required in keeping MeshJS up-to-date and useful, even before one considers code testing and development of new features according to cardano blockchain updates/hard forks.
Maintenance & hosting
All current products and services are hosted by MeshJS team members out of their own pockets. To enable this to be sustainable, we require funding which can help to cover these overhead expenses.
2) Community Engagements
2.1) Workshops, Training and Demonstrations
These sections are the crucial engine parts through which we aim to establish a strong MeshJS Developer Community, contributing and boosting open source development on the Cardano Blockchain.
Uptake of new tools, no matter how well documented, often benefits hugely from live workshops and recorded demonstrations. Aside from the time to actually schedule and deliver these, both also require planning, creation and preparation of suitable materials, rehearsals and skilled, knowledgeable facilitators to deliver them. A budget here would allow team members to dedicate the required resources to produce these essential services.
2.2) Engagement Capacity
At this still early stage, while there is limited knowledge within the community, it is essential that the team is able to respond to queries and questions from individuals in the community and often on a 1:1 basis. While we love to do this, it is extremely time-consuming and has proven difficult to stay responsive. A dedicated budget would allow team members to be able to dedicate more time in general to the project, and thus be able to engage more meaningfully with individuals to disseminate knowledge and answer questions while also handling their main tasks.
2.3) Bounty Budgets
We have already begun work with Gimbalabs on the development of a Cardano Native bounty board. Since developing our own “Bounty Boards” requires some time, we have also started to experiment with those existing on the Dework platform. However, without funding, we are not yet able to launch rewarded bounties. This proposal would allow us to allocate dedicated financial resources to incentivised bounties, incentivising participation from the community in the open source development of MeshJS.
2.4) Outreach and awareness
As everyone in MeshJS is already at capacity, even as volunteers, developing tools, libraries, documentation, resources and so on, we don't have the additional capacity to also maintain social media at the levels required to keep everyone informed and up to date on MeshJS developments. A dedicated budget for outreach and awareness would allow us to onboard additional team capacity and to ensure strong outreach and awareness across different social media platforms such as Twitter, Youtube, Reddit etc. This category would also include the creation of content, such as articles, infographics, videos etc to help inform and educate the community.
2.5) Community moderation
The MeshJS Discord server currently hosts +500 members and we have around ~1400 followers on twitter, making it a real job moderating the growing community. The moderation currently falls back to the MeshJS team, which distracts from time which could be better used in continuing to develop the tools, libraries and documentation. We would love to grow the team and reward a dedicated moderator group for the MeshJS Discord, allowing us to provide constant guidance and support for Discord members and giving time back to the developers.
2.6) Community Online live events
Communities benefit a great deal from open online events where everyone is able to join and to meet and connect with like-minded people. However MeshJS currently hardly has the capacity to organise and run such events due to the lack of time and resources. Allocating our own funds to the creation of community events would allow us to increase the quality of community interactions.
We envision different formats of online live events:
- Live Coding Session on Discord
Inviting the community into live coding sessions, where experienced developers guide and provide answers to questions from new and prospective developers
- MeshJS Playground
Inviting the Community into live Zoom Calls, providing latest news and updates from the MeshJS Team & Community and present ideas and projects from the Community
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
“The ecosystem will be improved by leveraging the increase of knowledge in the community”
The perception that building dApps on Cardano is difficult is holding back the whole eco-system’s development: web2 developers are running first to the “simpler” EVM chains and some developers have even left this ecosystem out of frustration. However, with good, well-documented tooling that brings the code to the developer, rather than scaring them off by having to learn complex new languages or to work with frustrating software, this need not be the case. Cardano can and should be easy and welcoming for a much greater number of developers to begin developing and become productive.
Mesh is dedicated to creating the best and most accessible open-source tools and libraries, with high-quality documentation, examples and integrations, maximising the productivity of both new and experienced developers coming in from web2 or other blockchain eco-systems. The current Mesh JS SDK and site is already a huge step in this direction: it is consistently cited as being one of the easiest to use and best documented Cardano dApp SDKs. Our aim is to expand on this early work to make the tools and libraries more comprehensive in response to the feedback from developers: a revamped and improved Mesh JS SDK will prove that building and deploying dApps on Cardano is both practical and fun, encouraging a new generation of developers from all over the world to create value in this ecosystem.
Mesh is in line with and directly aims for and contributes towards the achievement of all of the “examples” mentioned under the campaign brief, namely:
- * increase open-source project visibility –> increase adoption
- * Improve documentation –> increase adoption, increase the number of people that understand / can work on the project.
- * Adopt frameworks –> less boilerplate code, fewer bugs, more focus on core-business ideas
- * Many well-documented projects –> higher chances to have a commercially-viable marketplace
- * Many well-documented examples and demos –> increase the perceived reputability of the community
Further, MeshJS is fully committed to Open Source development. All our products and services are fully open-sourced with a commitment to comprehensive, high-quality documentation and supporting resources. All of this reflects our commitment to providing quality, easy-to-use development tools for the community.
Current and previously developed products by MeshJS fully align with several KPIs and intentions of the OSDE Challenge:
- More open-source projects, developers, and users
- Increase the number and quality of open-source projects
- increase the number of open-source tools and frameworks
- Increase the number of open-source contributions and maintainers
- Improve adoption of Cardano technology
MeshJS builds open source libraries and tools that enable developers to easily build powerful dApps on the Cardano blockchain. You can see our work at: https://MeshJS.dev/
To allow people to easily get started, we have developed several guides which allow developers of any level to make their first step building on the Cardano ecosystem: https://MeshJS.dev/guides, as well as some basic starter templates https://MeshJS.dev/starter-templates. For developers who would prefer to integrate MeshJS into an already existing project, we provide support for that as well with our https://MeshJS.dev/migration-manual-installation guide.
For advanced builders and projects, we go quite granular and provide easy to use and open sourced customisable code which includes integrations for cardano wallets, utilities and transaction builders. Currently, we are focused on establishing a comprehensive new open source library for cardano smart contracts. Additionally updating the full stack into a version 2 in TypeScript.
So hopefully it is evident by the work we’ve already done and continue to do, that we are fully committed and busy in working as active contributors to the open source developer ecosystem on Cardano.
All of the previous and current development relies fully on volunteer based contributions, and maintenance costs such as hosting are being paid out of our own pockets. This obviously puts a limit on the amount of time and resources that can be dedicated, as well as not being sustainable. We would love to keep building and ensure that the required dedicated time is allocated and practical. As we are now forced to confront the real challenges of sustainability and the need to have space to grow, we have come to the wider Cardano community to request support. This support will allow us to continue and level up our contributions, as well ensuring the maintenance of our already existing open-source products, and to help us to further develop these and new projects in the future.
Our vision for the long term is to develop a serious enterprise with its roots deep in the Cardano ecosystem, advocating open source and blockchain technology. The funds from Catalyst would help us achieve these goals.
We have also submitted a second proposal for the MeshJS Version 2 in the Developer Ecosystem Challenge as we see it better fitting to the intent of the challenge there. If you like this proposal, we hope you will find some exciting things at the Version 2 proposal as well.
Further, there are several things one can do to support:
https://MeshJS.dev/about/support-us
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
Community feedback: Direct feedback from the community on the quality and usefulness of the resources (SDK, documentation, team interactions, resources) - via direct engagements, conversations, events as well as active interviews and surveys.
Observation: quality and quantity of projects created
Collaborations, partnerships and opportunities: quantity and quality produced over period
Improvement of the SDK over the period: more reliable, more features, more useful, etc. as judged by all stakeholders and community
Other measurements:
Amount of Github activity at the MeshJS Github
Measurable via MeshJS - Github activity chart
<https://github.com/MeshJS/mesh>
Number of Completed Bounties at the MeshJS Dework Bounty Board
Measurable via the MeshJS Dework
https://app.dework.xyz/MeshJS-96531
Number and quality of hosted online events and participations
Measurable through uploaded recording from events on the MeshJS Youtube Channel
<https://www.youtube.com/@meshsdk>
Amount an quality of new content including educational, developer/training and social media content
( Blog Posts and Articles, Videos and guides )
Constant Community moderation on Discord and number of engaged newcomers, as well as the quality of interactions, engagements and things developed using Mesh
Measurable via Discord Server insights stats.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
We plan to provide regular updates through the milestone reports to the challenge teams, as well as participating in Catalyst Town Halls & Swarm After Town Halls to provide updates on the proposals implementation. Furthermore we plan to record these updates and make the recordings publicly available via Youtube and sharing through social media as Discord and Twitter to ensure the reach to a broad spectrum of the Cardano Community