isabella232 / baseline-grants

The Baseline Protocol has a yearly grant program for funding various R&D initiatives, implementation developments, and other community projects. This repo is used to track grant applications, bounty ideas, and payment requests for grant work.

baseline-grants

The Baseline Protocol grant program funds development, research, enablement, and other iniatitives that align with the roadmap and community objectives.

Year	Total Grant Fund	Total Allocated	Remaining Funds
2022	$100,000	$10,000	$90,000
2021	$100,000	$100,000	$0

Submit a Grant Application

Grant applications are submitted by individuals or teams to propose allocation of Baseline grant funds to a specific project.

Follow these steps:

1. Submit an issue using the "Grant Application" issue template.
2. Join the #grants channel in our community Slack.
3. Announce your grant application in the #grants channel with a link to the grant appliction issue.
4. The TSC will vote on the application at the next TSC session, and if approved will change the issue label to 'approved' and close it.

Process for Approved Grants

5. Once approved, finalize the commitment by submitting a PR to add yourself to the approved grant list.
6. A 'work tracker' issue will be opened in either the BLIPs repo (for technical, implementation, or standard focused work) or the Outreach repo (for enablement, research, or content related work). The issue will be opened by a community manager and assigned to the grant recipient(s).
7. Grant recipients will be required to comment on the 'work tracker' by the 1st of each month with a detailed update on progress, roadblocks, and any comments.
8. Once grant work is complete, the grant recipeint will submit an issue using the "Grant Payment Request" issue template.
9. The TSC will vote on the payment request at the next TSC session, and if approved will change the issue label to 'approved' and close it.
10. The TSC and community managers will faciliate the payment process for recipients to recieve their funds.
11. Community managers will align with grant recipients to feature the work at a Baseline Show or General Assembly.

Propose a Grant Bounty Idea

Grant bounty ideas are requests for proposed work for the Baseline community members or interested organizations to take on.

1. Submit an issue using the "Grant Bounty Idea" issue template
2. Join the #grants channel in our community Slack.
3. Announce your grant bounty idea in the #grants channel with a link to the bounty idea issue.

Contribute to the Fund

The Ethereum Foundation and ConsenSys Mesh have contrbiuted to the grant pool so far, if you're interested in donating monetarily to the advancement of the Baseline Protocol visit our Open Collective Portal.

Governing Rules

Administration and Management

The governing bodies of the Baseline Protocol (Technical Steering Committee, Project Governance Board and Maintainers Team) will be responsible for manging the grant program.

Voting Guidelines

The Baseline Technical Steering Committee is responsible for assessing grant applications or bounty ideas (RFPs, RFQs, etc) and the approval of payments once work is complete.

• Open items requiring a vote are reviewed at the next TSC sessions with time allocated for assessing grants.
• Thumbs up emoji signals approval
• Thumbs down emoji signals not approving

Submission Criteria will stipulate that:

• An approved project must align in accordance with the roadmap and needs of Baseline.
• Projects that directly support a commercial business opportunity, where the intent in proposing an allocation from the grant fund is to offset client fees, will not be favored by the TSC, but latitude to the TSC shall be given for special cases where a commercial project is adding important value back to the open source and to the standard. The judgement of the TSC in this regard shall be reviewed by the PGB and the governing body representatives quarterly to correct errors in judgment and build a decision-making culture that can be trusted to uphold the principle of not using these funds as a kind of “corporate welfare.”
• A project must have a specific beginning and end date, with monthly (or more frequent) updates complying with the process outlined above.
• “Check ins” are encouraged, which could include providing updates at the monthly livestreamed general assemblies.
• Project outputs should be rendered in open source submissions (accessible on the GitHub, website, or google drive), though there may be cases where project outputs may have a material impact on the purpose while not being appropriate for submission directly back to the Baseline Protocol github repo or website itself. The TSC shall use its discretion in this regard when selecting projects.

Examples of Grant Ideas

Below are some examples of work that would enhance the Baseline Protocol, this is not an exhaustive list but serves to spark ideas for potential applicants. Feel free to join the Slack or team meetings to further flesh out ideas as well.

• Baseline implementation that allows technical and functional personas to best understand how Baseline works.
• Contribution to a react.js admin dashboard for configuring and monitoring a baseline stack.
• Modularize the reference implementation test suite to allow more granular tests for each step within the protocol.
• Writing zero-knowledge circuits using gnark to expand the existing public circuit library.
• Building baseline plugins for existing software applications.
• Building common data schemas and methods of data translation so that data can be synchronized between systems of record.
• Resources that various personas can distribute to others to understand the value of Baseline.

Questions?

Ask in the #grants team slack or e-mail at [email protected]