Just Open Source Stiftung Grant Application
The JUST Grant
Table of Contents:
Motivation Letter
About Us / Who we are
Luke Schoen
- Luke is an open-source Web3 independent researcher and software developer.
- Luke is based in the EU having a German residential address.
- Luke graduated with a Bachelor or Engineering (Electrical), and a Graduate Certificate in Business and Technology in the MBT postgraduate course at UNSW.
- Luke researched economic theory, legal and regulation, on-chain governance, data markets, open-source communities, and on-chain identities for IoT devices when authoring the DataHighway Whitepaper in 2020 and presented at Polkadot Decoded in 2021.
- Luke researched applying ZK to Ethereum in the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship Cohort 4 and presented at DCxPrague in 2023.
- Luke recently researched Polkadot Agile Coretime and the Polkadot Ruby API in the BlockspaceDevRel team and presented at Consensus Blockspace in 2024.
- Luke is associated with the research entity Clawbird Pty Ltd.
Sven Buschbeck
- Sven is an experienced researcher and software architect with exposure at a leading Web3 protocol.
- Sven is based in the EU having a German residential address.
- Sven graduated with a Master of Computer Science equivalent (Diplom Informatiker FH), Computer Science and Communication Design ("Multimedia") from Technische Hochschule Augsburg, 2007.
- Sven is associated with the research entity Web Technology Consulting and Development Sven Buschbeck https://svenbuschbeck.net.
Why we are researching
Luke enjoys academic research/analysis, believing that prior proper planning, due diligence, and a thorough understanding of risks is necessary to help architect and realise the Web3 vision, similar to testing code for vulnerabilities. He wishes to realise the vision of this initiative spawned at EthBerlin04 and believes support from JUST Open Source Stiftung will help.
He believes academic research/analysis toward achieving its vision will enhance how each of the JUST Open Source Stiftung principles are adopted and that providing automated support tools will help individuals and collectives focus on Web3 promises.
What we are researching
Background
Previously we built an initial prototype called CodeKarma at EthBerlin04. The initial prototype command-line interface (CLI) tool parses, checks and reports on non-compliances based on the extent dependencies used in your code align and comply with rules mapped to a predefined manifesto plugin schema. The manifesto schema may include values of your own identity, JUST Open Source Stiftung values, Web3 values, DAO values, or Polkadot Decentralized Voices (DV) political stance values.
High-Level Goals of Academic Research
The high-level goals of our participation in the academic research grant will be to explore theory associated with ways to drive the most Web3 adoption across the following Focus Topic and associated Categories:
- Open-source communities
- Categories:
- Successful community ownership
- Collaborative creation on open source environments
Application Packet
Abstract Summary of Academic Research (Research Abstract / Summary)
The detailed goals of our participation in the academic research grant will be to explore theory associated with ways to drive the most Web3 adoption across:
- Open-source communities
- Categories:
- Successful community ownership
- Collaborative creation on open source environments
It will involve in-depth research/analysis of ways that decentralized collaborative communities with shared ownership that are engaged in collaborative creation and building on open-source environments may successfully detect whether they are misaligned and non-compliant with their manifestos, and to manage and reform themselves to successfully overcome those challenges using Web3 and open-source possibilities.
Objectives
The initial Objectives of what we are hoping to accomplish with this grant shall be as described in the "Abstract Summary of Academic Research" section.
Definition and Measurement of Success
The definition and measurement of success for this project shall be:
- Establishment
- Creation of a multisignature research/analysis account on one or more Web3 decentralised software platforms
- Creation of a research/analysis account on Web2 social media platforms (e.g. https://grillapp.net/@luke) to migrate the audience to Web3 decentralised software platforms (e.g. Joystream)
- Research, Case Studies, and Optioneering
- Journals and scientific studies
- Real-world or fake entities
- Research/analysis to include the discovery of, and a case study and interviews with at least one (1) real-world entity through optioneering that is a decentralised collective with shared ownership, whose manifesto specifically has open-source requirements.
- Note: If such a real-world entity (preferred) cannot be found, or is deemed to have been inadequately misaligned and non-compliant with its manifesto, specifically with open-source requirements, or permission to use any adequate real-world entity for the purpose of this grant is denied, or where access to that real-world entity is deemed cost prohibitive by the team, then the team shall create at least one (1) fake entity and at least one (1) fake manifesto, where that fake entity is adequately misaligned and non-compliant with at least one (1) of those fake manifestos.
- Plan for Data Analysis
- Define Objectives and formulated Research Questions and Hypothesis
- Creation of hypothesis and questions as formal problem specifications that clearly defines the topic of focus of the experiment to be used as a black box.
- Scrutinize the hypothesis rigorously using critical thinking based on an in-depth understanding of the subject to ensure the validity of experiments rely on a robust and testable hypothesis.
- Detailed Plan for Data Analysis
- Design Algorithm Theories from Specifications
- Design of algorithm theories to design algorithms from the formal problem specifications.
- Select appropriate sample size and representativeness, statistical methods that are aligned with the research questions for quantitative analysis of the data, and software tools based on defined goals.
- Feasibility Study of the research project with surveys, experiments and simulations to test the hypothesis for minimum viability, and determine whether it will be beneficial in terms of technical, financial, legal, and market aspects.
- Data Collection
- Obtain enough information for scientific analysis whilst being impartial and avoid getting certain results.
- Data Analysis
- Organise Data through cleaning and preprocessing depending on its quality
- Validation through peer review to avoid potential bias and to ensure interpretation is within context.
- Records kept for reproducibility, transparency, and reliability.
- Qualitative Analysis
- Data visualization to aid in identifying trends to help a non-technical audience gain into the research.
- Quantitative Analysis
- Insights identified of value from validating the hypothesis and draw meaningful conclusions and contribute to focus area.
- Review and reflect upon Data Analysis iteratively to check for any errors, gaps, or biases.
- Validate and challenge results and findings with other sources and feedback to improve it.
- Feedback
- Feedback forms to assess and adopt constructive comments and feedback for continuous improvement shall have consistent overall positive sentiment from all key stakeholders in Stakeholder Group #1 (at least a monthly) and #2 (one-off).
- Receive invitations to participate in further grant procurement, if possible.
- Adoption
- Improvement in the Web3 audience to demonstrate Web3 adoption by verified identities.
- Credit from adoption of the theoretical research/analysis by other Web3 researchers or open-source Web3 software implementers.
- Reporting
- Review/publish preliminary theoretical research/analysis progress reports, at least monthly, on the Web2 social media platforms and Web3 decentralized software platforms.
- Review/publish detailed theoretical research/analysis progress reports, at least a quarterly, where sources shall be cited and limitations and assumptions shall be acknowledged. It shall also mention the level of:
- Adoption
- Improvement in the Web3 audience to demonstrate Web3 adoption by verified identities.
- Review/publish work snippets on JUST Open Source Stiftung channels.
- Publications.
- Review/publish at least one paper under peer-review in a major publication by the end of the program, or if that is not possible, produce at least one paper under peer-review in our own new Web3 and open-source publication by the end of the program, and make that a major publication.
- Marketing
- Market the paper to try to have it published in one or more major web magazines, or if that is not possible, market the paper and publishing it in our own new Web3 and open-source magazine.
- Presentations
- Present the paper at one or more major Web3 or open-source conferences, or if that is not possible, present the paper at our own Web3 and open-source side-event associated with a major Web3 or open-source conference.
Stakeholder Groups
Stakeholder Group #1
- JUST Open Source Stiftung
- Open-source community
- Web3 ecosystem communities
Stakeholder Group #2
- Major web magazine, or the audience of our own new Web3 and open-source magazine
- Major Web3 or open-source conference, or the audience of our own side-event associated with a major Web3 or open-source conference
Example Potential Future Impact through Web3 Adoption by Web3 open-source academic researchers
Whilst not the focus of this academic research grant, our academic research findings could drive future academic research/analysis to explore theory associated with ways to drive the most Web3 adoption across other focus areas and associated categories, such as:
- Economic theory
- Investigate the incentivization impact of different token systems and financial structures that are owned and managed by on-chain collectives to steer entities toward alignment and compliance with their manifestos
- Legal landscape and regulation
- Investigate the most effective ways for collectives to detect and rectify misalignment and non-compliance of entities with legal and regulatory manifestos, including open-source licenses, in different jurisdictions that affect Web3 to help businesses to navigate the evolving legal regulations in an automated manner to scale Web3
- Governance
- Comparative analysis of the fairest and most effective consensus models and governance mechanisms (on-chain and off-chain) and strategic plans driven by them for collectives to use to detect and rectify misalignment and non-compliance of entities with their manifestos
- Experiment to discover the fairest and most effective power distribution for collectives to use that detect and rectify misalignment and non-compliance of entities with their manifestos
- Explorer potential legal, security, and other threats to the strategic plans
- Market forces, drivers, and trends
- Cross-chain analytical market research/analysis into the impact on adoption that may be caused by the behaviour of entities that are misaligned and non-compliant with their manifestos and potential ways to improve and the extent of improvement that could be possible by detecting and rectifying the misalignment and non-compliance
- Identity
- Research/analysis of ways to manage the extent of misalignment and non-compliance of entities with their manifestos securely and privately on the blockchain to allow those entities to access and control and improve upon their own data and reputation
- Investigate the behaviour and impact in OpenGov and creator economies of entities (e.g. Polkadot Decentralized Voices) that are misaligned and non-compliant with their manifestos and ways to improve
Example Potential Future Impact through Web3 Adoption by Web3 open-source software implementers
Whilst not the focus of the academic research grant, our academic research/analysis findings could drive the following future implementations:
- Legal landscape and regulation
- List licenses associated with each dependency and check for compliance against the manifesto
- Create a hash of the aggregated manifesto version and associated source code to be able to prove compliance at a specific timestamp
- Integrate misalignment and non-compliance detection using signature images
- Governance
- Integrate with separate tool that checks whether the behaviour of identities in OpenGov aligns and complies with values in the manifesto plugin registry
- Open-source communities
- Checks whether open-source code written collaborately by decentralized communities complies with values in the manifesto plugin registry towards achieving successful community ownership
- Integrate with separate tool that blacklists specific versions of dependencies that have not been collaboratively included and maintained using open-source in whitelisted Web3 environments due to misalignment and non-compliance discovered through crowdsourcing through successful community ownership of those dependencies
- Create headless UX compliance tests that specifically check for alignment and compliance with UX values from the manifesto plugin registry
- Note: This may be used by the Polkadot UX Guild
- Identity
- Provides guidance on how to write behaviour-driven development tests to increase the change that the code you write aligns and complies with the manifesto plugin registry to protect your reputation
- Miscellaneous
- Integrate local Git continuous integration (CI) for automation
- List dependency tree of a repository
Outcomes
In order for this project to benefit the greater Web3 adoption and achieve outcomes that align and comply with the expectations of the Web3 and open-source communities, it will be necessary accomplish with this grant the outcomes as described in the "Definition and Measurement of Success" section.
Grant Scope
The initial Grant Scope shall be as described in the "Abstract Summary of Academic Research" section.
Feedback was provided that the original proposal that touched on all the focus areas felt too general and broad, and recommended limiting its scope to only two focus areas maximum. As such, the revised proposal now has less focus areas and a more limited scope and shall go deeper into the analysis/research, as described in the "Inclusions" section.
Assumptions
Theoretical research/analysis exploration only.
Inclusions
As described in the "Definition and Measurement of Success" section, where the focus of in-depth research/analysis shall include the following focus topic:
- Open-source communities
- Categories:
- Successful community ownership
- Collaborative creation on open source environments
Licensing
Research outputs shall be open access with a free and permissive license.
Exclusions
- In-depth research/analysis into other focus topics:
- Economic theory
- Legal landscape and regulation
- Governance
- Market forces, drivers, and trends
- Identity
- Software build and execution
Constraints
- The team will request review of the Feasibility Study by JUST Open Source Stiftung. This will be a hold-point where the team will stop further work until confirmation is received as to whether they wish the team to proceed further or not.
Methodology
Plans to achieve our research/analysis objectives include the following. The details are in as described in the associated sub-section of the "Definition and Measurement of Success" section.
- Stage 1
- Establishment
- Research, Case Studies, and Optioneering
- Reporting
- Feedback from Stakeholder Group #1
- Stage 2
- Plan for Data Analysis
- Reporting
- Feedback from Stakeholder Group #1
- Stage 3
- Data Collection
- Data Analysis
- Reporting
- Feedback from Stakeholder Group #1
- Stage 4
- Publications
- Reporting
- Feedback from Stakeholder Group #1
- Marketing
- Presentations
- Feedback from Stakeholder Group #2
Timeline
Below is a brief explanation of the milestones/roadmap and expected deliverables.
- Stage 1 - Sept 2024 - Dec 2024
- Establishment
- Research, Case Studies, and Optioneering
- Reporting
- Feedback from Stakeholder Group #1
- Stage 2 - Jan 2024 - Apr 2024
- Plan for Data Analysis
- Reporting
- Feedback from Stakeholder Group #1
- Stage 3 - May 2025 - June 2025
- Data Collection
- Data Analysis
- Reporting
- Feedback from Stakeholder Group #1
- Stage 4 - July 2025 - Aug 2025
- Publications
- Reporting
- Feedback from Stakeholder Group #1
- Marketing
- Presentations
- Feedback from Stakeholder Group #2
The team will endeavour to try to complete the milestones sooner whereever possible, and shall notify the JUST Open Source Stiftung team as soon as possible in case of unforeseen circumstances arising that may cause delays.
Budget
The grant funds will be split between Luke Schoen and Sven Buschbeck.
Additional costs are anticipated to include:
- Access to research journals and scientific studies for information and data collection
- Access to research real-world entities
- Access to online educational courses
Budget breakdown:
- Stage 1 - €5,000
- Stage 2 - €5,000
- Stage 3 - €5,000
- Stage 4 - €5,000
Total requested amount: €20,000
Note:
- Software and hardware costs are already minimised since both Luke Schoen and Sven Buschbeck already each have performant hardware.
- Open-source software shall be used as a priority to further minimise costs. If doing so will impact the quality of deliverables or risk jeapardising achievement of milestones then the team will notify JUST Open Source Stiftung.
Additional Funds
This project has not received any funding or rewards.
Accolades
The prototype received recognition as a valid submission at EthBerlin04
Previous Research / Research Background
Below we have compiled our previous research background as academics even if not directly relevant to the proposed project (samples, Github, published materials, awards):
Luke Schoen
- 2024 Researched OpenGov to contribute to the Polkadot Decentralized Voices Program, https://forum.polkadot.network/t/decentralized-voices-program-luke-schoen/6111
- 2024 Researched and contributed to the AMI Bounty Program Charter, Polkadot AMI Bounty Program, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P8siu_3InLVxbj1IZUO-iuyUMVu02zuYAoPwAHcpAUw
- 2024 Researched and published presentation on Polkadot Coretime, BlockspaceDevRels, https://hackmd.io/@ltfschoen/Bymejv74C
- 2024 Researched and published presentation on Polkadot Ruby Libraries, BlockspaceDevRels, https://hackmd.io/@ltfschoen/Hy25QTH40
- 2020 Researched LoRaWAN and Polkadot to prepare DataHighway Whitepaper, MXC Foundation gGmbH, https://github.com/DataHighway-DHX/documentation/blob/master/static/whitepapers/economic/whitepaper_v1_2_0.pdf
- 2013 Candidate for Aurecon Awards 2013 under Collaboration and Diversity Category, Aurecon
- 2013 Research to deliver Marketing Audit Report and Strategic Marketing Plan to Head of Marketing, Aurecon, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxoAIKVnIh2dVVVHNmM4OG5kWG8/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-1tyPKMhSJ7o488v4JQ7ROw
- 2012 Australian School of Business (ASB) LEAD Business Leadership Program, UNSW
- 2011 Won AECOM Encore! Award in July '11 for dedication and strong work ethic on
challenging issues, AECOM
- 2008 Won Teamwork Asset Management Award, RailCorp, Australia
- 2005 Thesis, Faults in Motors/Generators with Signature Images, Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical), The University of Sydney (USYD), Australia, https://docs.google.com/document/d/0BxoAIKVnIh2dV3VIU1RBdkJ4OG8/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103113786777929863499&resourcekey=0-SsLsVOfDvi16KS-KWXqr8Q&rtpof=true&sd=true
- 2005 Finalist, Research Conversazione (Power Engineering)
- 2005 Finalist, Foundation Prize for Communication Skills
- 2005 Finalist, Research & Development and Business, Innovation Challenge
Luke is associated with the research entity Clawbird Pty Ltd.
Sven Buschbeck
- 2017-2022 Research to contribute to Nimiq Whitepaper https://www.nimiq.com/litepaper/
- 2010-2012 Research engineer and scientist working on interaction paradigms and prototypes for browsing of events and event related data for FP7 Project Glocal http://www.glocal-project.eu, DFKI GmbH SaarbrückenDFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken, Germany
- 2008-2009 Junior Researcher for FP7 Project Okkam. Software Architect and Developer of Semantic Web Technology in Java. User Interface and Interaction Advisor http://www.okkam.org, University of Trento
Sven Buschbeck has published scientific publications that are published here: https://www.bibsonomy.org/user/svenbuschbeck
Sven is associated with the research entity Web Technology Consulting and Development Sven Buschbeck https://svenbuschbeck.net.