SEA Community Hub Proposal: Sustaining Open-Source Development

Community Hubs
1

Summary:

The Sustaining Open-Source Development Community Hub will explore how open-source teams are currently dealing with attracting users, engaging developers and raising capital for their projects.

It will explore the benefits to a culture of open-source development on Ethereum and the creation of public goods that can be leveraged by all. We will also talk about some of the challenges and impediments facing teams building open-source software on Ethereum.

Additionally, we will look at open-source development outside of crypto and try to understand what Ethereum can offer that community to make open-source development more sustainable and how to foster better relations with the broader open-source community.

Motivation and rationale:

Open source has been a core tenet of Ethereum since its founding. Initially, most applications also followed suit, but increasingly we are seeing more applications with restrictive software licenses. This makes it more challenging for open source teams to succeed because there are less public goods for developers to leverage. It’s important for Ethereum to create a flywheel for open source-development where the success of one open-source project encourages others.

The Sustaining Open-Source Development Community Hub will be an important signal to the Ethereum community that open-source development is valued and to encourage new projects to develop in open-source. It will also be important for investors, many of which assume that an open-source project is not a good investment. By demonstrating the successes and increased investment opportunities, we can normalize investment into open-source projects and thereby increase public goods funding outside of just donations and grants.

The community hub will increase visibility for open-source projects and help demonstrate the value of public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem.

More than anything, the Sustaining Open-Source Development Community Hub will act as a central gathering place for open-source developers to share their experiences and learnings.

Implementation:

The community hub will be open from 10am - 3pm every day. Each day will have a different theme but operate with the same overall structure.

Themes:

  • Day 1: The current state of open-source development on Ethereum
  • Day 2: Open-source business models and investing in open-source projects
  • Day 3: Attracting open-source developers to your open-source project
  • Day 4: Fostering better relations between Ethereum and the broader open source movement

General structure:

  • 10:00 - 10:15 am - welcome and explanation of the programming for the day
  • 10:15 - 10:45 - single talk given on the theme of the day
  • 11:00 - 11:45 - panel discussion
  • 11:45 - 12:15 - demos and highlighting public goods open source tools in Ethereum
  • 12:15 - 1pm - Lunch break & meet and greet
  • 1pm - 1:30 - single talk given on the theme of the day
  • 1:30pm - 3pm - Demos, AMA and whiteboard session

Team

The hub will be primarily organized by the team at Powerhouse (part of Sky/MakerDAO). The Powerhouse team will be led by Wouter Kampman (former head of engineering at MakerDAO), Kilgore and Lumen. We also have the support of other prominent open source voices in Ethereum, including:

If accepted, we will include other open-source developers as well as investors and legal professionals that specialize in open source.

Equipment needed:

  • Media team for content production Workspace
  • Setup: Stage, AV equipment, booths w/ TV screens, chairs, whiteboards, and power outlets
  • Translation Services: Real-time translation services for non-English speaking participants to ensure inclusivity.
  • Promotional Materials: Banners, flyers, and digital content to promote the event and participating organizations.
4 Likes
2

would love to learn how wen can build our product to be 1) sustainable as a business; while 2) being as open source as possible.

1 Like
3

Hi!

Thanks for putting together this proposal

General Update on the Process

  • The RFP is now open until September 7th 2024
  • Shortly after this (mid-September), we will share which Community Hub proposals got accepted and will work with those accepted teams to fine-tune the proposals/hubs and how we can best meet their production requirements.

We’ll keep you updated, should we have any more questions!

Thanks!

1 Like
4

Yes, this is challenging. We are working on a model that we call “Scalable Network Organizations” which would leverage DAO control and offchain IP protection to create a type of retroactive funding for those that contributed to a project’s success.

The idea being that if you work on open source infrastructure that is used by others, some of that should be returned and paid to those that built the open source infrastructure.

Would love to chat more and share what we’re working on.

1 Like
5

I think it could be worthwhile to talk a bit about the challenges and pitfalls with attempting to incentivize contributions at scale (I’d argue to the point of doing it through cryptoeconomics may not being a worthwhile endeavor at this point) . It’s really hard to not inadvertently introduce perverse incentives. tea.xyz has arguably done more harm than good so far., for one. I still agree it’s important to keep exploring how to both incentivize and provide accessible social structures and technical infrastructure for startups and corporates to contribute back to the community, though.

Random related thoughts: Would campaigning for awareness and adoption of AGPL be sensible (and natural dissection of the “Fair Source” movement if there is interest)? What are challenges facing maintainers and project sustainability today? Would there be value in a “toolbox” of patterns and tools that could be reused across projects?

It draws my mind to what Apache Foundation and to some extent CNCF are doing. A similar shephard for the web3 legacy could be really beneficial.

3 Likes
6

Yes, we’d like to focus first on the challenges and pitfalls that folks face today.

And your point about scale is important. Tea.xyz has been a great experiment and it clearly is trying create a solution that solves the sustainability problem for open-source. I wonder, however, if we solutions need to be pioneered by individual projects and their own needs, rather than a macro solution? I’m not exactly sure what this looks like, but I have some ideas and would be great to discuss further!

I think the Apache Foundation has done great work, especially around establishing open-source standards and expanding into other projects. It would be great to have something like that in web3. I do think we need to come up with other models that help with sustainability, as Apache still seems focused on the value coming from approving standards and some charity/donation model.

I like campaigning for AGPL! It would be cool if we could make it like a badge of honor for folks building. Obviously, this is not the structure to create sustainability but social pressure can help build momentum and we need more ways of increasing visibility. Licenses are a great start.

3 Likes