How we are rewarding contributors to open-source NFT marketplace?

Foreword

Once upon time, we wanted to build public good, bit different and with shared ownership on top, from our craft between those who are contributing to our wholesome piece of work and helping us to render our vision true.

We've thought it would be way different, if we build our craft best as open source. As we believe in positive sum games, shared wisdom, collaborative work and collaborative intelligence we highly appreciate if we can be together on path with common shared goals.

Collaborative intelligence is a term used in several disciplines. In business it describes heterogeneous networks of people interacting to produce intelligent outcomes.

Paolo Soleri's "hyperstructure" in ground-level view. The figure to the right is the Empire State Building at the same scale.

We strongly believe providing something as public good would multiply our efforts and impact future for others, who come over and can build something really nice and help them be the next entrepreneur over weekend. That easy.

Thanks to Github, we've enabled networked human groups to efficiently combine their knowledge, wisdom, insights, and intuitions into an emergent intelligence. This might be often referenced as hive mind.

Open source development could be started by anyone and anytime. What's make difference is cause, funding and coordination, in nutshell governance of development to drive without less friction and codebase evolution happen in particular pace.

How it evolved

Yet our biggest pain issue was coordination and how people are rewarded. We identified this early and realised would be really great give people liquid reward -- money. Fast as possible to drive positive reinforcement loop to come back and contribute again in short-time.

That's seems has worked pretty well. Once we've started crossing 100+ pull-requests on monthly basis on average, we've hit over 230 pull-requests merged in one month. Simple superior effort, all 16 people involved in 30 days.

In retrospect, we've designed policy and rulesets. Crafted our Contributing Guidelines with standardised process how we do payouts. Sounds simple. On side line, delivering product with small revenue, traction and user base.

Steep Achievement

Seems innocent tactic results in steep adoption from open-source developers. In short we've opened flood gates for gig economy en masse. Hitting 160+ forks, 222 stars and over 70+ contributors in few weeks.

How this happened that quickly? Consistence, dedication and compounding effect.
At start, it was quite slow and it has required to make room people to contribute. We done lots of brain dump, like created 1k+ issues in our repository which we've found would be superior to have so developers has inspiration and they can go through loop of contributing, to bring their creativity. This flywheel of contribution made it working, it just took to pimp to it's best and being efficient.

Flywheel of contribution

Discovery

From perspective of newcomer, easy mode. Developer will find issues in our KodaDot repository, which has bounty levels from $100 ($) up to $1k ($$$$$) plus we have labels based on priority.

That helps a lot developer to gauge their interest whats is urgency for particular issue. Thats for brief start and issue discovery once developer has estimated their experience delivering fixed issue. Often is great for developer to ask to clarify what's needs to be done, so there is right alignment contribution made between those who created issue and who comes with resolved issue.

Life of pull-request

Once pull-request is made against our main branch, it's good to request code review from helpful folks, who are longer period around our KodaDot codebase and seniors in code-quality to check on your code. Requirement of this is to see what have you contributed meets best code practice. Once you receive review, there are two frequent options. Either you receive feedback with code suggestion -- what you could done better which isn't inherently bad, yet it's different perspective, which most of cases drives higher code quality for others and other new comers

Another option is simple approval, which there is higher chance you receive, once you are familiar with our code base.

Once someone made approval and done sort of static code analysis including our bunch of helpful dog robots and intelligence which reviews your code if you did not accidentally break something

you are entering very last stage of receiving reward for your amazing contribution paid to your wallet.

That's pretty much breakdown of stages how you can receive quick reward through contributing to open source. What's best on top, you are automatically eligible to be part of internal circle, which opens doors to level up your coding skills, fill your GitHub track record with legitimate open source web3 project, participate in less-public discussions and on top accrue reputation reward. That's our slow paced reward for those you are really like what we are doing and what opportunities we are giving away for others.

Leaderboard

To create trust for incoming developers and show proof we've sent fair amounts of payments out there, over 20k$ in pull-requests and another 70k$ on side with on-chain proofs, we've realised it would be amazing show super easy chart.

To easy see, we sorted our rank by rewards received. On side columns we've added amount per merged pull-requests, number of pull requests vs merged pull requests and charts goes on.

Best takeaway, you can see yourself that prachi00 as women developer, she is on the top of our chart. This brings KodaDot open-source repository is not only dominated by males.

LEADERBOARD.md

Flexibility of contributing

Best of all, we don't hold anyone as contractor around to helping us on this. Anytime you can come and go, withdraw yourself anytime. You are pretty free.
We even break down potential thoughts what we guess developers keeps on coming.

Few notable reasons are

size of reward - ranging from $50 up to $1k
Flexibility - whenever you are available, you do PR.
Belonging - Squad goals, we craft something unique together
Challenging Puzzles - pushes you to learn something new and get reward
Proof of Contribution to OSS - Whenever you will be looking for your next job, companies already referring to us
Bug hunting - infinite challenges helping real-world codebase

How we nurture connections between developers

Now we are in stage, where coordination aka all-hands developer community calls happens on bi-weekly basis and people can drive development with their insights to make it better. We welcome everyone improving opinion as it contribute to wider wisdom and better market fit of codebase one is making. We've found it as infinite universe what we can improve and we always enjoy what for one can be obvious solution, for other could be blind spot. Maintaining peer-admiration and raising awareness in respectful way is key we build our ethos and soul.

This open doors for anyone to participate from outside and making codebase improved by their perspective. We are trying to have warm, welcoming and inclusive culture, that's we are high on ethics.

Okay what we are building

You might question why we are doing this. We've realised hence our biggest goal is to driving experimental NFT landscape, we can actually dog food ourselves with one experiment at a time. That's how we making this developer incentives real and it's sort of our case to demonstrate it is already possible. To further extend KodaDot experiment, we are building it as scaffolding interface for others builders out there, who would like to build something on MetaPrime way faster with help of others. It's just matter of time, inspiration and experience gathering around to drive better NFT dapps further.

Conclusion

More KodaDot is getting mature, more complex problems arising. That's at some point we will getting someone making out of bounties which will act as their continuous payroll. With one detail, pay as you go. Once more these kind of people is onboard, more autonomy KodaDot as project will receive from it own founders.

In retrospect, having our async culture helps us a lot. To drive our iterative evolution, we have lot of issues, really tons of issues, we've crossed issue total count 2500, even mental issues after those issues (jk).

We add there bounties to cover development of this monstrous machinery. We have over 50k$ in bounties right now. We've managed to capture and create long contributing.md thanks to 70+ contributors as acts as our soft-smart-contract for contributing.

If you are considering to contribute, best is to pick small and easy issue, join our Discord and let's chat further, there is lot of interesting puzzle you can help us to crack and being rewarded in form of money, experience and reputation.

You can take peak on our bi-weekly development digest we've called Meta_Hours which is often recorded and we are posting agenda ahead of event so anyone having question can well prepare.

Our end game is goal that KodaDot will be where we are going is that being builders-owned marketplace engine which will connects multi-chain future of NFTs ecosystems.