ICDevs.org is getting back into governance...but we need your support

Developers Showcase
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We just published an updated and fresh set of ICDevs Guiding Principles — a public statement of what we’re optimizing for, why, and where we’re putting the work.

In the past we’ve moved away from proactive governance, but we don’t really feel that is appropriate any more. With DFINITY getting quieter, we feel we need to step forward even when we disagree. Our disagreements are on the edges and we generally agree with and appreciate where DFINITY has brought us. But with very little to lose at this point, there is not much reason to be very direct about where we disagree and why. Actually procuring a say that matters is a very long road, but we have to start somewhere. In the meantime it would be safe to say we are going to be a network agitant when it comes to network governance. Watch the skies. #Mission88

:backhand_index_pointing_right: Read it: ICDevs Guiding Principles

Why now

ICDevs is a 501(c)3 educational and scientific non-profit, independent of the DFINITY
Foundation. The ecosystem is at an inflection point: AI is changing who writes software,
governance is being tested, and commercial-focused organizations are making decisions that affect infrastructure the whole ecosystem depends on. The IC needs institutions whose mission
isn’t tied to a product roadmap or a fund cycle.

The headline ideas

  • Retain the builders who show up — with retroactive public goods funding that rewards proven, lasting impact.
  • Ensure Motoko has an independent, long-term future beyond any single commercial organization. (The motoko team DFINITY Caffeine Labs is AMAZING but we’re not super jazzed that they’ve been shipped over to an org with caffeine’s risk profile.
  • Maintain and improve core libraries, ICRC implementations, and developer tooling.
  • Develop AstroFlora as the permanence, provenance, and trust layer for asynchronous computing.
  • Build community-driven security, audit, and verification infrastructure.
  • Advance AI-native development methodologies and self-writing internet infrastructure.
  • Deliver a push-button EVM experience on the Internet Computer.
  • Develop sustainable, market-based node provider incentives that strengthen decentralization.
  • Restore long-term staking with an 88-year reward curve that rewards conviction and stewardship.

What we’re working on, and when

Underway now: builder retention / retroactive public goods · core libraries, ICRC
implementations & tooling · AstroFlora (provenance + verification)
Near-term: an independent, permanent home for Motoko · a push-button EVM on the IC
Medium-term: community security & audit infrastructure · AI-native / self-writing
infrastructure
Long-term (mostly governance + research): 88-year staking & long-term governance
alignment · sustainable, market-based node provider economics

The doc also lays out the governance principles we’ll use to guide our NNS voting —
including a two-tier idea where short-horizon stakers steer near-term decisions and
long-horizon stakers steer protocol direction, and replacing SNS launch gatekeeping with
verification (provenance + community audit) rather than permission.

It’s a living document — argue with it

This is v0.1.0 and we want it challenged. The source is in a public repo — open an issue or
PR against any principle: GitHub - icdevsorg/guiding-principles · GitHub

How to lend your support

We’ll have opportunities down the road to stake and donate maturity — we’re just finalizing
the front end for that. But honestly? Nothing beats giving money. Direct donations are
what fund every bounty, grant, and piece of public infrastructure we ship.

Read it, share it, and tell us where we’re wrong.

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Hard pass from me.

Last time y’all showed up it was mostly radio silence followed by random proposals that felt like ‘trust us bro, we code sometimes’.

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if @Oldcrustyballs would also promise not to join, i might consider it :wink:

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who says i’m doing the sniffing? money would be lucky to have me

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Yes…trying to finalize a work on reviving an old forum software we have sitting around. putting an IC backend adapter on it. It will have a strict no-a**hole rule.

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It is kind of straight out of 1998 but conversations compact up nicely tagging and topic association is topic friendly. I’ve seen some other forum projects on the IC lately as well and I’m all for promoting good software, so we’ll see what we end up doing. Need a bit of tweaking, but it should just slide onto icdevs.org fairly easily.

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Was there something in particular that you felt ICDevs fell down on? We issued over $171k in bounties to developers over the last five years that has directly resulted in a significant amount of open source code on mops.one. Our lawyers advised us to get out of voting on SNSs and voting on governance proposals was generally abandoned after conflicts arose across different organizations and it became clear DFINITY was just going to push through whatever they wanted.

As far as I can remember the only NNS proposals we issued in the past were for our named neuron and maybe the anti-spam tokenomics proposal that Dfinity asked us to submit…but actually I think they ended up doing it.

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Welcome back Austin and ICDevs. I think it’s good for the ecosystem to have you involved in governance. I hope people will let you peacefully do your work instead of feeling the need to harass you all the time. Fortunately, there is a new generation of folks who are willing to fight the negativity and false narratives that are constantly coming from a few bad actors. I hope they decide you are one of the good guys and will help stand up for you if folks give you a hard time. I know you have thick skin and don’t need that kind of support, but sometimes it helps to know that others appreciate your contributions instead of only hearing from the vocal minority. Governance is difficult and it’s nice to know that good people such as yourself are willing to step up to formally help support the developers.

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At least one year too late, unfortunately.

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Austin, this is great news! The narrative is powerful.

IC enthusiasts have always understood in the back of our heads that just like Satoshi needed to leave BTC in order to have a truly decentralized development ecosystem, DFINITY also always needed to have a community hand-off to make the IC a truly decentralized community project. They never got there.

My first reaction at the end of the Caffeine/Mission70/NationStateAlliance disaster was that DFINITY had crashed the plane and that this was the end of the road. But reflecting on this further, the tech is still here! I think this is all just a catalyst and the “Satoshi Sign-off” moment for the IC has come sooner rather than later. It would be even easier if DFINITY would resign, open source the rest of their code, say that they are no longer developing at the protocol level and pursue their own side projects.

But as you mentioned, the future is uncertain and this in my mind is starting to look more like a mutiny since realistically would DFINITY ever step down? Project Mutiny. Let’s take over the IC. A sliver of Internet Computer hope for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.

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Hey Austin,

Thanks for the detailed response and the context on the bounties—that $171k in funding for open source work on mops.one is solid, no argument there.

That said, my main issue with ICDevs wasn’t the bounty program. It was the broader positioning and decision-making, especially around governance and independence. Stepping back from SNS voting and NNS proposals after conflicts is understandable on one level, but from my perspective it left ICDevs looking reactive rather than principled—especially when DFINITY was clearly steering things. The “we got out because lawyers said so and DFINITY was just going to do what they wanted anyway” vibe came across as excusing a lack of real pushback.

And honestly, the fact that Weasel is strongly supporting you and ICDevs is a big red flag for me. His track record and pattern of behavior have shown me he’s a bad actor in this ecosystem—someone who consistently prioritizes certain agendas over transparent, community-first development. That association makes it hard for me to view ICDevs as fully independent or aligned with the kind of decentralized ethos I care about.

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why not make a groupchat or server or sumn, or if one exists why not link it

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Wenzel what an earth are you wearing?

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There is a much larger story to tell here but I’ll let sleeping dogs lie for general board peace. I’ll tell it over beers if we are ever in the same place. I will be transparent about a few things. First, I didn’t think it would be hard to balance launching ICDevs(an organization with a mission to advance the IC) and be the CTO of Origyn(an organization building on the IC), but it was, in fact fraught with peril. What happened was systemic, and I think it sheds some light on what was “off” about the whole DFINITY thing from the jump.

In researching daos.icdevs.org I looked at a bunch of DAOs. Few were successful. The ones that were successful were generally small, were a collection of equals, were generally made up of dox’ed people, and had a unified mission. Sometimes they had a singular leader, but most often not.

DFINITY did not act this way from the jump. It was a strange time and I’m not trying to point fingers because it may have been the paranoia that even got the IC to launch…but there was a lot of paranoia…and then the “not made here” started popping up in a serious way, and all of a sudden the “DAO” think became very, very handwavy.

Origyn launched a token and a DAO, with some limited governance, far before the SNS launched. When I was there I saw first-hand the devs that were building governance platforms peel away from the IC as the SNS was announced, as no one wanted to compete with DFINITY. Why would you? They had Billions in the treasury and had all those PHDs. How would you compete?

So when that first red flag came up where I was like “THIS IS CLEARLY NOT GOOD FOR THE ECOSYSTEM” but I was working for a company with very high-level ties to the foundation it was a quandary. Origyn needed grants. ICDevs needed grants. How to cut the baby? I eventually had to remove my leadership in origyn to keep ICDevs going. In hindsight, this was all dumb. It was also capitalistic. At the same time I needed independence, my dependence on my position with Origyn was growing and Origyn’s runway was changing shape. Cash is king. History is rife with examples where unhealthy relationships were allowed to endure because people were not willing to give up the gravy train. We’re living through one now.

For better or worse, DFINITY canceled its grants program just about the same time as the Opus moment for LLMs. Suddenly, I’ve been able to produce code far faster and with fewer resources than before. Additionally, I’ve secured funding for my ‘regular life’ outside of the IC. I aim to not find myself dependent upon the foundation again, and I’d recommend that no one become dependent on the foundation or on ICDevs entirely because it doesn’t work.. That is why retro-funding is so attractive. It attracts people who are already somewhat independent to do work they are passionate about, and then they are rewarded in retro to their contribution. It removes the forward-looking dependence. It isn’t perfect because a bunch of great devs don’t have the resources to be independent…but it also much easier to do more with less now, so perhaps the world self-heals.

So, yes, your intuition that we lacked conviction has some merit…I couldn’t act without jeopardizing my livelihood. I think I did a good job finding the best path to be as independent as I could. My attempts to get Pan Industrial off the ground were rooted in trying to get revenue from outside the ecosystem to help build the ecosystem. It was marginally successful, and PI built some things and had a healthy relationship and well-defined grant relationship…but it wasn’t perfect either. We have been trying since 2017 to sell the enterprise thing and court DFNITY as a partner, only to be held at arm’s length. Odd…but whatever. The tech works. It does things we needed it to do.

My current goal is to lead ICDev’s in a good direction without having an overbearing dependence on any revenue for my well-being. I don’t think there is really any other way to do it.

So there is some insight for you…it isn’t without a bit of shame, but I’ve worked with enough other devs in the ecosystem to know that there is very little actual shame in it. Many, many of us were all in the exact same place and trying to make something out of nothing.

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The cynicism here is flat directed at the architecture of caffiene…and it is hardly the dev’s fault. Initial versions of caffeine exuded the “not built here” and “we know better than you” spirit that has been pervasive from the DFINITY foundation. Having audited motoko contracts in the past, I know where a lot of the dragons were and caffiene didn’t have the handles for devs to wrangle them…you were dependent on DFINITY’s hidden prompts to guide you and keep you from mistakes. I didn’t think it would work then and I’m not sure when it will eventually work, but we’re closer now(not because of dfinity, but because models like mythos are going to be able to proactively red team code).

Dev’s buidling with claude code or VS Code Co-Pilot didn’t have their hamstrings cut which is why it seemed like such an odd thing to bet the farm on. They’d lost like a week after they announced it and just chugged along building anyway. Now…Dom is usually almost always right…eventually, but in this case I don’t think it took much common sense to see that eventually was a ways out and there wasn’t enough funding to get there and that there were a couple big hairy gorrilias in the room that were almost assuredly going to eat anyone else lunch if they did manage to get there first.

As to your questions about process and info and learning spaces, I’m certainly excited to build systems to share those things and contribute to the broader ecosystem. I have a half written book called “contextual architecture” sitting around that I keep trying to get back to. But I’m far from the only authority. What we need are institutions, not people, where these things can live.

I don’t have anything baked enough to share yet, but these kind of things are what we want to build. If you sniff around what we’ve built and what is outlined in the “form language” section of DAOs.icdevs.org you’l likely get a good idea of the kinds of things that I think are important to build some structure and bones around.

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It is still in the hopper…I have two flavors. One is just an anything goes deal…the other is more federated and decentralized and has some intersting tokenomics like things…that one is a bit further out.

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i’m interested in/scoping putting activitypub (or equivalent) nodes into canisters. there are quite a few options now for federated services, Fediverse.Party has a few. fedify also looks interesting architecturally.

did you have a particular pattern in mind?

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Have you seen what @Gekctek did? I’d start there…I think he had almost the whole thing working for a dao controlled blue sky account. (I think there was one unavoidable off chain component). The stuff I’m messing with is more personal wallet and federated data based. More on it after the 23rd!

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Well done Austin. Leadership. Nice to see.

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