Roles
Roles are groupings of a particular type of work that a community member will choose from when deciding where to focus their time whilst being a contributor
Roles provide clarity to contributors and the wider community on what each contributor is mainly working on to support the ecosystem. Voters get clarity by being able to judge who they want to fill certain roles within the ecosystem.
Contributors select a role to indicate where they will spend the most time supporting the ecosystem. Selecting a role does not mean the contributor can't help in the other areas. It instead simply means they will look to spend the majority of their time in that selected role.
Budget ranges and minimum thresholds are added to guide contributors when creating their proposals. The minimum thresholds help to ensure there's enough of each role and skill set in each contributor cohort.
Roles available
The following are the initial roles for contributors to select from.
Development
Objective - To support, develop and align the community on the creation and maintenance of scripts, libraries and tools that improve the developer ecosystem and stake pool node operation for Cardano.
Tasks
Research, analyse and report on technical implementation approaches and best practices
Create, maintain and improve technical standards, security standards and design patterns that can be used in ecosystem infrastructure and applications
Define and iterate on technical requirements for ecosystem functionality
Research, plan and present software architecture approaches for ecosystem applications
Develop and maintain applications and features, tools, scripts, frameworks and utility code for the ecosystem
Test, debug and monitor application software changes
Track and analyse the performance of ecosystem applications
Support, improve and promote open source projects with technical expertise, guidance and development effort
Communicate with developers and the community to identify what infrastructure or development issues exist to then be considered and prioritised
Write and maintain technical documentation about ecosystem systems and processes
Provide support on how the Cardano ecosystem operates technically such as stake pool node operation and about any development tools, libraries and processes
Coordinate technical efforts across the ecosystem and where suitable attempt to align standards, technical implementations and processes
Host technical discussions and meetings about the Cardano developer ecosystem, stake pool node operation, infrastructure available in the ecosystem or for giving updates on ecosystem changes
Provide feedback to technical proposals on their development plans or implementations
Coordination
Objective - Maximise the coordination and collaboration in the Cardano developer ecosystem and between stake pool node operators to encourage more alignment and collaboration whilst also helping to find problems, support the community and grow the ecosystem.
Tasks
Communicate and collaborate with the community to identify areas where more support is needed or where the biggest problems exist
Communicate with anyone working in the ecosystem to identify and resolve pain points so contributors are able to work most effectively
Organise and manage an ecosystem calendar for ecosystem events, updates and meet ups
Support translations of resources and documentation and coordinate with global communities
Identify any skill gaps that exist for teams working in the ecosystem and help them where possible in finding suitable contributors for those skill sets
Write, maintain and aggregate documentation about how to understand and participate in the ecosystem
Provide community members support for understanding the Cardano ecosystem, development on Cardano and operating any ecosystem infrastructure
Review contribution efforts across the ecosystem and identify areas to encourage more collaboration and alignment or more application of standards and best practices
Host community discussions and events about relevant ecosystem topics
Review proposals, provide feedback and identify any opportunities for collaboration between projects in the ecosystem
Analysis
Objective - Research and present information on the development and usage of the Cardano blockchain to both inform the wider community and to also guide future development efforts.
Tasks
Conduct ecosystem research and analysis to identify problems and opportunities for improvement
Collect, aggregate and analyse community feedback and overall sentiment about the ecosystem
Gather, analyse and report on statistics about ecosystem infrastructure usage, performance and outcomes
Create, maintain and improve ecosystem processes for gathering and measuring data, performance and community feedback
Conduct market wide research and report on similar ecosystems and their infrastructure or product usage, performance and outcomes
Write and maintain documentation about processes, research findings and ecosystem statistics
Provide support to community members in understanding the available ecosystem research, analysis and statistics
Coordinate efforts towards applying information around research findings, analysis and statistics to the maintenance and improvement of ecosystem systems and processes
Host discussions and meetings about ecosystem research findings, analysis and statistics
Provide feedback to proposals that could benefit from considering relevant ecosystem research, analysis and statistics
Potential future roles
The following are other options to consider that could become roles in the future. Currently the Cardano blockchain is managed and improved by IOG. Over time this will get pushed more onto the community as the governance phase Voltaire is released and the ecosystem reaches more maturity. In that event there will be future roles to consider that will benefit the Cardano ecosystem.
Product
Gathering community feedback and putting together analysis on how the chain is used could be applied to improving the product development of different development areas for the Cardano ecosystem.
Design
Design assets and improved user experience could be useful for the libraries, tools and SDKs created for the Cardano ecosystem. Documentation could also benefit from improved visual or video based resources.
Education
Many of the existing roles can support the education of the core ecosystem. Those tasks include writing documentation relevant to what each contributor is working on and also hosting meetings with other contributors and the wider community. Coordination, design, product and marketing roles are well suited for helping create visual education aids to support education. If there is difficulty maintaining ecosystem educational resources a group of full time education contributors could be considered that would solely focus on educational materials, sessions and generally supporting the community.
Human resources
The role of dealing with who is and isn't a full time contributor will be dealt with by the community governance vote. Initially through general voters and then potentially in the future refined down to engaged community members to make it more scalable and simplify the process. If a contributor does not perform or produces conflict with others they are likely to not secure future funding so managing contributors from a human resources perspective could be fairly self governing. Depending on the issues faced from funding contributors directly in the future a more full time human resource contributor could be considered to resolve and manage these issues. Alternatively this role could end up being achieved under a form of auditing role that is fulfilled by community members at the end of contributor funding terms with the right incentive models in place.
Finance
Contributors would be funded directly from the treasury initially in six month terms. This helps makes the initial process need little oversight. However the core ecosystem will have other costs such as server costs or usage of SaaS tools to help the contributors work effectively. Managing these costs could be done through a governance process done by contributors using a shared funding pot. If the complexity of managing a shared funding pot increases over time it will make sense to explore the usage of a finance role so that these concerns become better managed.
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