Common Vision, Common Goals, Common Knowledge
Nervos Network is a fully open source project. Our long term vision for the Nervos Network is to be fully decentralized in all aspects and community led. Part of our journey to achieving this is enabling and empowering individuals, projects and teams who share a common vision for the network.
Growth of the Nervos ecosystem and developer community is one of the highest priority initiatives to achieve our long term vision and goals for the project. In order to facilitate and bootstrap this growth, the majority of our ecosystem fund will be used to fund and support people and teams who want to contribute to the growth of the Nervos ecosystem.
The objective is to define a clear and transparent Grants Program system, where anyone can apply for support and funding for their work in helping to grow the Nervos Ecosystem. This RFC lays out our proposal for this system. We welcome all input, feedback and suggestions from the community which will be used to finalize the Grant Program structure and design.
Please note: the Nervos Grant Program process and workflow has been updated to create more visibility for the community and give applying teams more flexibility and support during the process.
RFC: Nervos Ecosystem Grants Program
Process of Grant Submissions
The grant application process will consist of 3 rounds, the first being a Grant Proposal Abstract posted to Nervos Talk Forum for initial approval of the concept and team, the second being an Technical Specification posted into the same thread and the third round being a final Q&A Discussion with the review council with the summary and result published into the thread.
The program will initially open for grants for infrastructure building projects. A “wish list” complied by the core dev team and review council will document the areas of high value we would like to see grant applications for. The Program will continue to be expanded in scope throughout the year and beyond, including:
- Infrastructure grants
- Community grants
- App and use case grants
- Marketing, sponsorship and promotion grants
- Scholarship, bursary, research and personal grants
First Round: Grant Proposal Abstract
Anyone is welcome to submit a Grant Proposal Abstract by posting a thread on Nervos Talk Forum, on the Grants Board.
The name of the thread should be TEAM NAME - PROJECT NAME with the tags “Grant” and “Abstract”. This Proposal abstract is then open for discussion with the community and developers.
The format of the abstract should follow the specification below:
- Team and background (Name, website, github and other social profiles, team members and profiles, previous projects) - why are you the right person / team for this project?
- Project and justification - why is this a valuable addition to the Nervos Ecosystem?
- High level technical specification and implementation - how can this be implemented successfully and done with CKB programming model?
- Timeline and project duration
Second Round: Technical Specification
Successful Grant Proposal Abstracts will be contacted and invited to publish a detailed Technical Specification. The details of this will be on a grant by grant basis and discussed directly with each team via Discord. The Technical Specification should be posted into the original Nervos Talk thread, below the original abstract. The Tag “abstract” should then be replaced with “tech spec”.
This technical specification will then be open for feedback and discussion from developers and community for at least 10 days or after all discussion and questions have been resolved.
Third round: Final submission and Q&A call
After the Technical Specification submission and sufficient feedback and discussion period has completed, a final Q&A Discussion call can then be organised between the reviewing council from Nervos and the project team. This format can be flexible to achieve the resolution of the grant assessment but most likely will include the project team presenting their project and plan and an open Q&A from the review council.
Review Criteria & Review Council
The Review Council will be made up of senior engineers from the Nervos developer teams. When assessing grant proposals, the following criteria will be assessed in order to reach a majority decision on whether to approve a grant application:
- Have all issues and challenges brought up by team and/or community during the RFC period been resolved?
- Is there majority support / consensus for the project from community and Nervos team?
- Is the budget and timeline reasonable, justified and achievable?
- Are we confident the person / team can deliver the project successfully?
- Does this add real value to the Nervos ecosystem and align with the Nervos core principles and values?
If there is majority support from the Review Council, the grant application will be approved. and move into the Grants Program.
Grants Program
Process
Once a successful grant application has been approved by the Review Council, the project will be assigned a Grant Project Manager. This Grant Project Manger will be the point of contact from the core team and will be responsible for overseeing the Project through to completion as well as providing regular reviews and updates for the core team and community.
Grant Fund Payment Schedule
The grant for the project that was agreed during the final review process will be paid out in stages (checkpoints) over the course of the project development. These stages will be aligned with the agreed road-map and checkpoints. The Grant Project Manager will be responsible for assessment of the checkpoints and request of payment release which needs final approval from Review Council Member.
The payment schedule has some flexibility but the default structure is as follows:
- After initial approval, at project start : 10% of grant money
- Checkpoint 1 (project is 25% complete): 15% of grant money
- Checkpoint 2 (project is 50% complete): 25% of grant money
- Checkpoint 3 (project is 75% complete): 25% of grant money
- Project completed: 25% of grant money
Following project completion, a “maintenance” grant for continued development can be discussed.
Checkpoint Review Process
The Nervos Grant Project Manager is responsible for assessment of the checkpoints and recommended approval of payment release. Grant payments will not be released until the relevant checkpoint has been adequately demonstrated as completed.
Project Development Requirements
We require all Grant Program projects to:
- Develop projects in an open source way and on GitHub. Any private repos should be shared with the Grant Project Manager
- Must be published under a open-source software license e.g MIT
Additionally we ask that anyone within the Nervos Grant Program ensure a high level of personal and professional ethics and morals as well as respecting the Nervos core principles and values. Any team member or project that is deemed to have fallen outside this code of conduct may be removed from the Grants Program. We hope all people, teams and projects within the Nervos Grants Program share a common vision and goal for the future success of Nervos Network.
