I want to introduce a new initiative we are experimenting with: Grant RFPs and Bounties
The goal of the initiative is to provide additional incentives to build public open source infrastructure on top of the Internet Computer.
Grant RFPs
A Request for Proposal (RFP) is a call for a grant proposal dedicated to a specific topic. RFPs can be rather broadly scoped, and the applicants are expected to outline their proposals in the grant application. We’ll start by using the well-known DFINITY Developer Grants process for this, but we might set up a dedicated process if it turns out useful.
The first RFPs are focused on the new unique capabilities that the Internet Computer is getting:
Bounties are tasks with a smaller scope, well-defined acceptance criteria, and a price tag. Similar to the ones you know from ICDevs (which we’ll also further support).
There’ll be multiple types:
Traditional: One applicant is selected to work on the task.
Multiple: Multiple applicants can get selected to work on the tasks and get paid.
Contest: Multiple workers can submit work, but only the winner is paid.
Cooperative: Multiple workers can submit work, and the bounty is shared.
More bounties will come in the next weeks! Stay tuned!
How you can contribute
Besides answering an RFP or taking a bounty, you’re welcome to provide feedback on the RFPs and bounties themselves to increase the appeal and usefulness of the outcome. In addition, you’re also invited to suggest RFPs and bounties.
Therefore, we opened the Discussion section on the Grant RFPs and Bounties Github repo to propose, discuss and upvote prospective bounties or Grant RFPs.
Can you please ELI5 what is RFPs? It’s like a grant where we only work on some particular subject instead of freeroaming? Or is it some kind of “propose a cool idea for someone to implement”?
yep, it’s the former. We’ll work on channeling more grants to specific areas and hope to provide better support for those. Maybe the best example - for now - is the Agents RFP.
Ok @domwoe since i also am unfamiliar with the rfp process i have some questions. So the idea is that if we have something to contribute with code to a specified area, say HTTP out calls, then we submit an application to dfinity grants for it? What contribution to code, if any, would be considered too small for a grant? Just anything that seems not worth at least $5K (smallest grant size)?
For example, I have 2 potential RFP related contributions
Looking into making a Motoko Json-Rpc library for the new outgoing http call feature. Would that make sense to apply for
I wrote the .Net IC agent but it could definitely use more polish, features and documentation.
I’m just trying to get a sense of what an expected Grant request looks like in terms of size or the project itself, Just some guidelines.
I can better picture what a traditional Grant request looks like but the RFP in my mind is less defined and library code can vary greatly in size. Besides the agents, what would be done examples you would look for in an RFP request.
with the http request feature we will need jsonrpc parsing/serialization. The ethereum api is jsonrpc for example.
Not much missing, mainly polish and additional features
Better documentation
Authentication flow. Currently you have to hardcode in the private keys
Variants are a hot mess
I doubt there are any users yet but i have no idea
This one i don’t think is worthy of a grant by itself, just trying to get a sense of the expected RFP requests
The Requests for Proposals (RFPs) are a mechanism to provide (a bit) more guidance and inspiration for developers interested in grants. Your proposal will then be a regular grant application, which should follow these guidelines. This is not a proposal for a government grant
On your project:
I agree that we need a Motoko JSON library to serialize and deserialize from/to Motoko data structures because most HTTPS endpoints will expect and return JSON. I still don’t understand what the RPC would be.
An example of a 5k grant could be:
Polish .NET agent (ideally you’d list the features you’d want to implement). The result could be the first milestone
For both parts, it would be great if you’d provide simple well documented example apps, that you contribute to Sample Code
Hope this helps. Otherwise, feel free to drop into the DFINITY Grants office hours (see Discord) or if this doesn’t work DM me and we can set up a quick call.
In order to foster more community input on potential bounties (or even artifacts we create at the Growth team), we’ve opened a discussions page at the Grant RFP and Bounty Github repo and started collecting potential bounties that were floating around.
We hope that this becomes a space to collaborate on proposing, discussing, defining, and ranking potential bounties and other work items.
