This repository tracks projects, initiatives and chunks of libp2p work that are (or may become) incentivized, for enthusiastic OSS contributors to pick up and tackle.

Refer to the issue tracker to browse what's being funded and/or discussed, and what's the status of proposals. Explore the labels for quicker navigation.

Table of contents

• What is this? ❓
• Motivation 🎈
• Repo structure 🧩
• Submitting a proposal 📝
• For developers 👾
• Need help? 🙌
• License

What is this? ❓

This repository tracks projects, initiatives and chunks of libp2p work that are (or may become) incentivized, for talented OSS contributors to pick up and tackle.

Objects of devgrants include: protocol implementation, tooling implementation, research, testing, optimization, etc. They may target one or more libp2p libraries, or they may be universal efforts to advance the entire ecosystem.

We track project proposals as GitHub issues, and specifications as markdown documents. To make browsing easier, you can find the latest project statuses and discussions in this repo's issue tracker.

Issues are categorized along various axes using labels:

• Complexity: Low, Medium, Hard, Extreme.
• Status: Proposed, Funded, Delivered, Discarded.
• Readiness: Yes, No.
• Programming languages (e.g. Go, Rust, JS, Java, etc.)
• Topics (e.g. security, DHT, pubsub, etc.)
• Selected (e.g. for hackathon X, round Y, etc.)

Motivation 🎈

The libp2p networking stack is becoming a public good. Major large-scale projects like ETH2, Filecoin, Polkadot, IPFS, Cosmos, etc. are adopting libp2p as a foundation for their networking layers.

Collaboration in the p2p space is indispensable to build truly unstoppable, future-proof p2p networks. All these projects share the motivation to propel libp2p forward towards higher robustness, maturity, and feature richness.

This repo serves as the junction between those communities to propose, enumerate, discuss, and agree on jointly funding crucial, substantial chunks of work that, when addressed, would benefit various actors synergystically, or even the entire ecosystem altogether.

Note: how devgrants are actually allocated, contracts signed and payments settled is out of the scope of this repo. This may happen through hackathons (e.g. ETHBerlin), privately, or eventually via some kind of Decentralized Autonomous Organization (how cool would that be 😎).

Repo structure 🧩

Each proposal/devgrant is tracked in a dedicated issue. The issue tracker indexes and tracks the status of project proposals and devgrants. It also serves as the discussion forum.

Specifications live in markdown documents, with their filenames referencing the devgrant by GitHub issue number.

Submitting a proposal 📝

This is all new and we're still figuring out the process and details, so bear with us :-)

Submitting a project proposal is easy. It consists of filing an issue, and an associated PR, following a simple template.

Here's the how-to:

1. File an issue with the title of the proposal as a placeholder. Take note of the issue number.
2. Fork the repo, and copy the file TEMPLATES/000-project-proposal.md to the root of your fork.
   • Fill in as much detail as you can.
   • The submission doesn't need to be perfect, we can sort out details later. At this stage, we want to keep the barrier to propose a project low.
   • In the filename, replace 000 with the number of the placeholder issue you created above.
3. Submit a PR to this repo. Make sure you enable the allow edits from maintainers option in the PR screen. Then go back and edit the issue, adding a link to the new PR.

That's all! Here's what happens next:

1. The community reviews the proposal PR, enhances it, refines it, discusses it, etc.
   • This is deliberately left unstructured, but we expect downstream project(s) to chime in to champion, and tentatively commit to fund XYZ amount towards the execution.
2. An experienced libp2p community member comes along and fills in technical details to lock down scope, write up an actionable spec, and provide resources, guidance or references, in order to streamline the ramping up of the grantee.
   • They will need to commit to your PR's branch, that's why we need the "allow edits from maintainers" option enabled.
3. The scoped & spec'ed proposal is once again reviewed by the community. Additional projects may chime in to co-fund. After a sensible period, the committed grant amount will be locked in the proposal description.
4. Via the assigned off-band mechanism (hackathon, email, DAO), contributors signal interest, and co-funders communicate to select a grantee.
5. That grantee delivers the project.

For developers 👾

Watch this repo to stay up to date with project proposals and to engage in the discussion as potential grantees.

Need help? 🙌

For questions or feedback, contact: @raulk.

License

Dual-licensed under MIT and ASLv2, by way of the Permissive License Stack.