We look at Open Source as the best way to enable interoperability between different technologies and applications. But in the Cardano Ecosystem we have a set of open source projects that have <u>no standards for basic cross-project integration</u>. For instance, there are no standards on how to document, set-up, and contribute-to projects. Moreover, there is no common infrastructure that the projects can use to track issues, and publish basic public information about the <u>projects funded by the community</u>.

We are of the advise that we need a set of standards, processes, and infrastructures to be used by the Cardano open source projects, such that (1) The teams of different O.S. projects can easily collaborate; (2) New-joiners can easily discover, understand, test, and contribute to existing O.S. projects; (3) Cardano O.S. projects can access a pool of basic infrastructures and tools that are needed.

Motivation

As mentioned by Charles Hoskinson [1] "Cardano code is Open Source, but needs to be managed like a true open source project, like Linux and other O.S. projects [..]".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T88_XKzi8ms&t=492s

In order to proceed in this direction, we need to use Catalyst as a governance over a true, vendor-neutral open source and open-standards ecosystem. To achieve that, we are missing processes (e.g. how the project teams should behave and participate in the ecosystem), and infrastructures (e.g. VCS, CMS, Wiki, Forum, etc.)

Guiding questions:

• How can we guide the growth of a vendor neutral ecosystem?
• How can we build a common identity and increase awareness on Cardano projects?
• How can we increase the discoverability and the commercial adoption of our projects?
• How can we increase the degree of collaboration across different projects?
• How can we lower the barriers and increase open participation to our ecosystem?
• How can we provide equal opportunities to all projects no matter the size?

Possible directions:

• Incentivize collaboration across projects to solve complex problems
• Introduce common standards and processes and incentivize their adoption across projects
• Provide cross-project infrastructures and tools needed to co-ordinate
• Ensure the existence of a cohesive knowledge base
• Support a network of professional technology ambassadors

Note

This challenge builds on top of the existing F8 Open Standards & Interoperability and is loosely related to F9 OSDE Open Source Dev Ecosystem (https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/401296).

Shortly said: This challenge (OSI) is about Openness, standardization, and interoperability across open source projects funded by the community, while the "open source" (OSDE) one is about increasing the number/quality of projects.

References

[OPSTD] Almeida, Fernando & José, Oliveira & José, Cruz. (2011). Open Standards And Open Source: Enabling Interoperability. International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications. 2. 10.5121/ijsea.2011.2101.