TL;DR
Kudos is a platform designed to streamline the process of onboarding new developers to the Polkadot ecosystem. We make it simple to browse, search and filter open GitHub contributions across the entire ecosystem, allowing aspiring contributors to find projects and tasks, which match their skill level and interests. In addition, we provide project maintainers the ability to tag open contributions with custom incentives, ranging from native tokens, NFTs, POAPs and many more. Lastly, we are working with ecosystem teams to actively curate sets of high quality, context-rich issues which aspiring contributors can begin working on immediately.
Who we are
A team of three technical co-founders who all successfully graduated from Wave 3 of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy at UC Berkeley.
Motivation
The motivation for Kudos stemmed from a shared challenge encountered as successful graduates of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy. Despite being equipped with specialised skills in Polkadot technologies, we, along with many fellow alumni, found it difficult to immediately secure roles within the ecosystem, mainly due to the global tech hiring slowdown. Unfortunately, the lack of open roles in the Polkadot space at the time led to many skilled individuals accepting roles in other blockchain ecosystems or Web2 industries. One potential path to getting hired into the ecosystem is via contributing to the open source repositories with the hope of providing value and getting noticed. However, the difficulty with this method came into sharp focus during an alumni catch up at the sub0 Polkadot Developer Conference. Here we discussed the daunting task of navigating the Polkadot ecosystem to find suitable projects that aligned with our interests and skill levels. With over 25 000 repositories in the Polkadot ecosystem, efficiently locating and contributing to relevant open issues seemed nearly impossible.
Another motivating factor was the proliferation of low effort, low quality issues across the ecosystem. Issues lacking context and clear explanation simply serve as friction for potential contributors and generally end up accumulating as stale issues in the repository. In a previous post about his ecosystem wishlist, the Polkadot Fellowship’s Shawn Tabrizi further mentions that the current distribution of open ecosystem issues most likely follows a bell curve, with the majority of the issues requiring an intermediate core developer experience, while the majority of contributors are most likely interested in completing “good first issues” or “easy tasks”. This disconnect acts as a barrier to entry for less experienced developers and hinders developer growth.
Finally, we were inspired by the various decentralisation initiatives taking place firstly within the ecosystem itself but also in the wider world. As witnesses to the rise of flexible remote work and the normalisation of distributed asynchronous teams, we have all seen the power of decentralisation in action. Inefficiencies born of archaic processes begin to melt away as new methods of collaboration and value exchange emerge. We believe we can best contribute to a more decentralised future by providing tools and infrastructure which enable win-win situations for both projects and contributors.
From our motivations two questions arose:
- How do you best engage developers who are keen to contribute but lack a straightforward way to connect with appropriate opportunities?
- How do you create a positive feedback loop between project teams, contributors and the wider community, in a way that accelerates the growth of the Polkadot ecosystem?
Introducing the Kudos Portal
We are thrilled to reveal the Kudos Portal - https://www.morekudos.com
- Unified Repository Access: The portal consolidates repositories from the entire ecosystem into a single platform, providing a comprehensive view without the need to navigate through each individual repository on GitHub.
- Project Categorisation: The portal allows for refined searches based on specific interests and programming languages, enabling users to easily find projects that align with their skills and passions.
- Issue Curation: Kudos is already in collaboration talks with projects to curate sets of high quality issues which provide all of the necessary context to allow a contributor to begin work.
- Custom Incentives: We offer project maintainers the chance to utilise our smart contract templates along with customisable GitHub Workflows, allowing issues to be tagged with incentives which can later be automatically claimed by the contributor once the contribution has been accepted.
The actual alpha version was developed during the recent Encode x Polkadot accelerator program - (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdDhO5SFuFA&t=306s ).
Ecosystem Fit
There are various initiatives within the Polkadot ecosystem aimed at developer engagement and upskilling.
- The Polkadot Blockchain Academy which aims to seed the Polkadot ecosystem with skilled developers.
- The Polkadot Developer Heroes program which aims to create a developer community, with a focus on mentoring and knowledge sharing.
- The Polkadot Fellowship is composed of core protocol developers with a focus on retaining technical expertise over the Polkadot meta-protocol.
- The Polkadot Dev channel on Twitch which aims to produce engaging video content for new and experienced developers alike.
We aim to complement these initiatives by providing a way for aspiring contributors to gain experience through solving meaningful tasks while potentially earning rewards while doing so.
Our core target audience is split across the following categories
- Developers & Contributors
- Projects & Teams
- Community
For contributors we want to help you:
- Find interesting tasks to work on
- Find great-fit contributions which match your skill level
- Find issues which are well documented and clearly explained
- Gain production experience and hone your skills
- Get hired and build a professional reputation
- Build relationships and network with other developers in the ecosystem
- Earn monetary and social rewards
For teams we want to help them:
- Ship faster
- Engage and upskill their developer/contributor community
- Gain greater visibility and actively promote their project
For the community we will:
- Provide a unified location for a browseable community wishlist
- Provide the means to aggregate and deliver feedback to ecosystem teams
- Allow the community to pre-emptively fund and upvote wishlist ideas and feature requests
Vision
Agile Devtime
We want to provide projects with the ability to rapidly and flexibly increase their workforce on demand. Whether it’s to take advantage of a new grant, or to polish up existing features allowing the core team to focus on more fruitful endeavours, we want to provide the infrastructural and organisational layer to make this possibility a reality.
Kudos Issues - Kudos Milestones
Kudos already streamlines the discovery of GitHub issues for contributors, aligning tasks with their skills and interests, but we plan to supercharge the value we provide by partnering with ecosystem teams to introduce two minimal mechanics:
- Kudos Issues - high-quality, context-rich problems that are ready for immediate action by contributors
- Kudos Milestones - “tracking issues” for larger achievements that encompass an incremental list of individual sub-tasks
Both Kudos Issues & Milestones will be taggable with incentives. Kudos Issues provide a one off reward for a well defined task, while Kudos Milestones will have an incentive pool claimable by contributors upon completion (e.g. bounty).
It’s important to note that the motivation behind open source contributions often stems from the contributors’ interests and experiences, not from financial incentives. Consequently, monetary rewards do not form the central pillar of our platform. We envision optional predefined rewards as simply a useful tool in the hands of maintainers, who always have the final say on which contributions are accepted, thereby ensuring that only high quality work is incentivised.
Latent community potential waiting to be tapped
Each project in the ecosystem has a core team, whose focus will be on the project’s main value proposition, and who will be engaged in delivering features related to their planned roadmap objectives, typically by executing on a set of clearly defined tasks. However, every project also usually has another set of more fuzzy tasks, often not fully scoped out due to time constraints and lack of personnel. These types of tasks vary in their nature, ranging from revamping documentation to developing better testing tools. Kudos will offer a way for teams to leverage the developer community by regularly working with projects to draw out these tasks into a set of actionable open contributions which can be worked on by members of the Kudos community.
Next Steps
We have already begun planning out our immediate next steps to extend the platform
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Enhance contribution navigation by extending our search mechanism functionality
- By trend: See trending collaborations, explore new projects, perfect for finding new challenges in your area of interest.
- By project: View in-progress roadmaps, find similar projects, identify active collaborators to engage with.
- Exploring teams/contributors relationships: Navigate back and forth between teams, projects, and contributors, uncovering a network of key players in your niche.
- Using favourites: Access metrics, identify active teams, and spot the latest collaborations.
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Develop collaboration workflows that are easy to integrate with existing projects
- Develop a special Kudos GitHub label set for both issues and longer term milestones, for use by maintainers who wish to participate in the Kudos initiative.
- Kudos Issues: Integrate our hackathon-winning incentive tagging mechanism directly on the Kudos platform. Tag individual issues with customised incentives and explore the development of an ecosystem wide Kudos version of the Substrate tip bot.
- Kudos Milestones: Adopt a project-level bounty approach for short-term, potentially grant-funded roadmaps by leveraging “tracking issues” or GitHub projects. This approach is designed to share a larger vision with external contributors and release incentives upon overall completion.
Future Ideas
-
Kudos reputation system and contribution metrics
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Notifications: stay updated with alerts on your interests and engagements
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Community engagement tools (e.g. upvoting community wishlist)
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Open job boards
Feedback
We are going to be presenting our ideas at the upcoming sub0 developer conference in Bangkok on March 12th, where we hope to present a full picture of our project. We want the development of the Kudos platform to be driven by the community’s needs and welcome your feedback and suggestions!
!). I see a valuable proposal over here!
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voting on issues?
