Please describe your proposed solution.
How we perceive the problem
There are barriers to entry in efficiently managing open source projects. This includes a lack of use of open source tools that are needed to assist in milestone reporting, contributor resource allocation and project management. This lack of tools inhibits Open Source project development and growth.
Our solution
The Fund 10 Open Source Automation proposal will address this problem by developing Open Source tooling including GitHub automation, a user interface and procedural documentation and guidance.
This will include -
1 - The specification, development and implementation of an automation solution on GitHub.
The first part of the project will set up and develop API calls needed to access GitHub issues and data from a project board. This will include the installation of a JavaScript framework, writing the code for API calls, and processing the returned data.
2 - A user Interface / dashboard
The second part of the project will build a user interface in the form of a dashboard that will present the processed data collected from the API calls. This will provide insight on a project’s monthly performance and assist with resource allocation. In addition a prompt generator will be provided that can be fed into chatGPT to generate a report on milestones.
3 - Procedural documentation and guidance.
The final part of the project will provide documentation and guidance on how the tool can be forked, so that it can be implemented by other users. This implementation will be made quite simple. To supplement the tool, documentary guidance will be provided on the use of GitHub project boards and issue tracking.
4 - A flexible code template.
The code is a template that can be tweaked to fit the way your project operates. Collaboration will be made easier as resource allocation will be more straightforward. A clear view of status and progression will help with project management and provide contributors with relevant information.
Reasons for our approach
Automation of routine tasks in open source projects enhances their functionality and broadens their utility to a wider audience. We intend to target the overhead of project management tasks familiar to many Catalyst proposers and build tools to assist with milestone management and reporting. In addition our dashboard will assist with user accessibility and our documentation will advise on developer reuse.
Who we will engage
We will engage, support and provide resources to existing and new project teams and share our work widely with the community. Our focus will be on helping Open Source users in Catalyst with their projects. For example this project management solution will be used by the SingularityNet Archive workgroup, QADAO, Treasury Guild and Community Governance Oversight.
How we will demonstrate or prove our impact
We will demonstrate and prove the impact of our proposal by tracking the use of this resource, incorporating feedback and documenting lessons learnt on our GitHub project board.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
This proposal addresses the F10: Developer Ecosystem - The Evolution Challenge by equipping and supporting users and developers with tools and working infrastructure to further evolve the developer ecosystem. We are creating a tool that will directly support Catalyst proposers and incentivise the use of open source.
In particular we will fulfill the following Challenge directions -
- The maintenance of documentation using real world examples that are relevant to the Cardano ecosystem.
- The provision of support structures in collaboration with other community projects in the Cardano ecosystem.
- The creation of incentivization and collaborative structures using the resource allocation features of the project board and tool.
- The creation of dashboards for open source project management.
- The creation of template repos and project boards.
- Demonstrating and making use of the GitHub API.
We will bring the following benefits to the Cardano Ecosystem during and after the project completes
- Improve the effective delivery, growth and productivity of projects building on the Cardano ecosystem.
- Better Milestone reporting by Funded Projects in Catalyst using our tool.
- Easy Incentivised collaboration for projects in Catalyst using our tool
- Promoting Open Source to projects building in the Cardano ecosystem
- A continuation of Open Source Tooling that benefits projects building in Cardano
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
[Description] - We will effectively manage and measure the milestones of our project and our partner projects.
[Measurement] - By extracting data from the project boards and assessing how the tool is used we will demonstrate the impact on the productivity of our partner projects building on Cardano's ecosystem.
[Description] - In the short term, funded projects will do better reporting, this will benefit the Cardano ecosystem by promoting better monthly reports and successful projects.
[Measurement] - This will be measured by the number of reports created with the help of this tool.
[Description] - In the long term the use of our community created tools will improve the effective delivery, growth and productivity of projects building on the Cardano ecosystem.
[Measurement] - This will be measured by how many projects use our tool and how this use has impacted their productivity.
[Description] - Projects will have an easier time allocating resources to their contributors. This will benefit the Cardano ecosystem by promoting collaboration.
[Measurement] - This will be measured by the number of successful resource allocations done using this tool.
[Description] - The wider success of our project will be measured by the performance and number of projects forking our repo and using this tool.
[Measurement] - This will be measured by the number of times the repo has been forked.
[Description] - This project will be completely transparent by having a public GitHub Project Board that has all the information on tasks being done and ADA being allocated to the tasks. This will benefit the Cardano ecosystem by promoting transparency for funded projects in Catalyst.
[Measurement] - This will be measured by the number of tasks being completed on the project board and the commits made in the repo every month.
[Description] - When the tool is ready, people will have access to project dashboards and useful monthly performance stats. This will give people insight on the monthly performance and growth of tne project using this tool. This can be a great tool to view the performance of a funded project in Catalyst building on Cardano.
[Measurement] - The number of people who access our project dashboards and use the performance stats.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
We plan to spread our project's outputs over discrete stages that run for 8 months. The detail of our milestones can be referenced in the Milestones section.
We will share our outputs with the aforementioned project teams (SingularityNet Archive Workgroup, QADAO, Treasury Guild and Community Governance Oversight) who can take advantage of efficiency opportunities.
We will share these dashboards with people we work with. (For example if we are in a call and someone shows interest in one of our projects, we can share this dashboard to show the progress of the project)
A successful completion of this proposal will support further research and development in streamlining project management of other community proposals. We expect to continue to develop further tools and enhancements that build upon this proposal.
Any future projects that we will work on will make use of this tool and hopefully other people in these other groups using the tool will also start using the tool in any other projects they are involved with. We will gather any feedback from them as well as look for improvements that can be made as we use this tool in the different projects.