Please describe your proposed solution.
The best open-source projects have great documentation and committed developer communities. Our proposed solution is to support the evolution of the Cardano development ecosystem by demonstrating how a set of Cardano-based tools supports open-source projects in a new way.
This proposal outlines the three parts to our solution:
- Publish Project-Based Documentation for onboarding developers to the Open-Source Andamio Project.
- Facilitate Live Coding Sessions and a recorded archive of past sessions, because collaborative development is an effective way to build skills and relationships.
- Continue Developing the Andamio Platform, in public, so that all developers can learn in real time about new possibilities on Cardano - and build upon what we’ve started.
Andamio is a Learning Management System (LMS) built on Cardano. It is built for organizations of all sizes to share knowledge and onboard contributors. Andamio includes smart contracts and UI components for treasury management, skill and contribution tracking, and emergent reputation that:
- Supports projects and organizations to deliver documentation, making it easier to onboard contributors to open-source projects.
- Supports contributors to build emergent, on-chain reputation by learning from documentation and making contributions to a project.
- Connects contributors and projects as expertise grows across a network.
With this proposal, we will engage with developers and organizations who want to use the Andamio Platform to build robust organizations and open-source spaces. We know that effective open-source development is much more than simply “releasing the code”. The real goal of open-source development is to create communities of developers, so that further innovation can happen.
Cardano is built for precisely this sort of innovation. The Andamio Platform demonstrates how. Aspiring developers are already benefiting from our work, and we have a long track record of supporting new organizations to take root. The existing Andamio code is already public, our MVP is live, and it is time to set a new standard for what open-source documentation can be.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
The campaign brief says, “This challenge setting aims to incentivise large ambitious open source projects as the next phase as The Evolution of Developer Ecosystem”
We built the Andamio Platform to support the evolution of the Cardano developer ecosystem and beyond. It is an example of a “large, ambitious open source project” focusing on education that helps organizations thrive. Cardano projects do not yet address these problems. Our solution to well-known problems of education, organizations, and open source development will dramatically extend interest in the Cardano ecosystem by offering solutions to a new class of issues and igniting the imaginations of people who don’t yet see utility in blockchain.
The campaign brief asks, “What are the tools that we need to prioritize first and how do we incentivise projects to be open source?” and “How do we attract developers from outside of our current community to participate in Catalyst?”
Sustaining open-source developer ecosystems is a problem that pre-dates blockchain technology. By showing a new way to sustain open-source development, we are generating a new wave of interest from experienced developers and open-source advocates. We built Andamio precisely to do this. We have applied Plutus smart contracts, Cardano transaction templates, and new, emergent identity solutions that kickstart a new wave of development work.
The campaign brief asks, “What would make a developer motivated to grind through the docs and code no matter how hard it is to create a dApp?”
If reading docs is a grind and it’s hard to create a dApp, then we won’t motivate a sufficient number of developers. You can’t have a successful open-source project if the documentation doesn’t motivate developers.
Great documentation is essential to great infrastructure. Devs know this and should expect it. Compelling examples are inherently motivating - just like a great game. And collaborative communities of practice make anything possible. When developers know that they are not alone, and have ample opportunities to learn alongside others, they engage. We know this because we’ve been practicing it.
The campaign brief asks, “What are enterprise dev managers looking for in order to be able to build out enterprise projects - either internal or commercial?”
Enterprise dev managers know that they need skilled contributors to achieve their goals. Andamio doesn’t just support the training and onboarding of devs - it also helps enterprises validate the track record of any contributor, and for new networks of developers to form.
The campaign brief lists “Potential Directions”. Here is how we aim to deliver on several of them:
- Knowledge base & documentation - this is what we propose to deliver.
- Deployment, testing, and monitoring frameworks - we will show by example how deployment and testing works on Cardano.
- Samples, recipes, and templates - Andamio provides a set of components that can be applied flexibly depending on the developer and organizations’ needs. We will provide samples and templates for each.
- Hackathons - Gimbalabs & Plutus PBL are ongoing hackathons. We have shown that hackathons do not need to be one-off events, but can be continuous. Gimbalabs will continue to deliver value this way.
- Dashboards - see MVP at <https://plutuspbl.io/contributors>
- APIs, and Oracles - Andamio provides APIs for connecting contributors and open-source spaces.
- Support, Incentivization, and Collaborative Structures - Andamio is the Spanish word for “Scaffold”. Scaffolds provide support for building new things. We will continue to show how collaborative Live Coding sessions are an essential part of open-source documentation.
The campaign brief says, “Beyond tools and infrastructure, we need to nurture a growing developer community with incentives for ambitious infrastructure projects.”
We agree! Andamio is an “ambitious infrastructure project” that is not just built to deliver documentation. Andamio provides a set of Cardano contracts and UI components that allow projects of any size to provide incentives for ongoing work. We will show how, by building the Andamio documentation in Andamio itself, which will provide an illuminating example for other organizations on how to incentivize ambitious open-source infrastructure projects.
The campaign brief says, “Accelerated dApp development and aligned strategic goal of Cardano which is increasing the number of open source projects on Cardano.”
The Andamio Documentation will provide a new example for what open source documentation can be. We call it “Project Based Documentation”, and it’s about more than simply telling people about the code. We will
- Provide examples showing tools in action and allow devs to go under the hood.
- Provide spaces where developers can learn together and start collaborating, because learning and collaboration are at the heart of open-source development.
- Clearly show the work ahead and help people learn how to contribute - open-source development should help people improve as developers, and if they want, become valuable contributors to commercial projects.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
Throughout this project, we will ask:
- Are we making it easier for developers to build on Cardano?
- Are developers contributing to Andamio?
- Are developers using Andamio to support additional projects?
Each month, we will report our answers to these questions. When we are successful, we will share what we have learned. When we are not successful, we will build upon our experiments.
Project-Term Metrics
For a five month project duration we will track these quantitative metrics:
- Number of Contributors to Andamio codebase: tracked via project repositories on GitLab
- Number of projects and organizations sharing documentation via Andamio: tracked on GitHub and GitLab
- Number of contributor tokens minted on the Andamio Platform: here is an example
- Number of developers earning rewards for contributing to open source projects via Andamio.
- Attendance at Live Coding sessions: we will provide a public dashboard showing attendance and links
- Projects launched by attendees: self reported by learners and contributors
We will also use surveys and in-person feedback to collect qualitative insights that drive improvements to the Andamio Platform.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
Output 1: Andamio Open Source Code + Documentation Site
- The key output of this project is the Andamio Platform Documentation. It will be available via a public URL, for anyone to access.
- The Andamio Documentation will evolve over the course of this project, based on what we learn by measuring success as described above.
Output 2: Live Coding Sessions
- We will host 3 Live Coding sessions each week for 20 weeks (60 Live Coding Sessions)
- Meeting recordings will be shared via YouTube and archived in the Andamio Documentation site.
- Registration links will be shared via public URL, Twitter and Discord every week.
Output 3: Public, Transparent Budget
- Project funds will be distributed to contributors with an Andamio Treasury Contract.
- Anyone will be able to see a detailed breakdown of how funds were used via a public dashboard.
- This public view will be a live example to be referenced in the documentation.
Output 4: Leading by Example
- The “meta” output to this project is that we are using the project to demonstrate a higher bar for what open-source documentation can be. This will create conditions for further development work, because when other organizations see how Andamio works, it will generate interest in further development and use cases.