 Hello, good afternoon everyone. So, a quick show off and how many of you here are blockchain developers? I am guessing most of you are like non-open source developers who are not doing any blockchain right now other than that. Have heard about blockchain but not really developing. So, this is going to be a talk which is targeted to both blockchain developers and non-blockchain developers because it's mostly about open source and it's not something that we are doing a new thing in blockchain, but it's more about we are using the blockchain technology that's already available to do something towards open source. So, a little about me. This is my Twitter handle. So, I am a full-sag developer working in Gitcoin full-time and I have been contributing to open source for quite some time now and hence my interest in this topic. So, since all of you are in FOSDM, I guess all of you already know the wise and how to contribute to open source. So, that's something I'm not going to waste my time talking about. I guess the statistics are also not needed for convincing you that open source is important and it's not something like doesn't exist or something like that, but I'll still show some of the statistics. So, yeah, 96 plus million active GitHub repositories. There are other platforms. I'm just telling about GitHub. 78 percent companies that run on open source, 92 percent of all the applications that you're using contain some open source code and open source libraries. 140 billion economic value provided by open source. So, all these numbers say a great story, a great story about open source, why this is important, why we all are here together in FOSDM. But this is the sad story. Well, may not be sad, but then it's a sustainability problem story that 62 percent of all these projects are self-funded, which means they don't really have any funding. They do it because of the love of the community, the love of open source. What happens is there is always a burnout or most of the times we see that they burn out and then they have to discontinue. If you don't believe me, then here are a few of the examples. So, how many of you have heard about semantic UI? Any front-end developers? Awesome. So, semantic UI is one such project which has like since many of you have heard about it, you already know it has a lot of stars, many people use it. It's a good alternative to bootstrap, but there have been things like this happening in semantic UI. The maintainer of semantic UI basically has a problem like, see I have been working in open source, this is great, everything is working fine, but this is not really sustainable, this is not something I can continue doing and leave my life with it. This is another. Anyone of you have seen this comment or know about this, even stream story? I think some of you might have seen this because anyone who works in JavaScript or Node.js, I'm pretty sure you have heard about it. So, this is something which happened recently, not many days ago in November. So, someone actually gave away the maintainership rights to someone else who introduced a vulnerability in the code because of which a lot many open source projects, like almost all these JavaScript projects got affected. This is how many of you know about ESLint? Again, most JavaScript developers. So, this is a tweet made by the ESLint author and maintainer. So, means anyone who does this open source thing is, I guess they have always had this kind of a conversation. At least I have had this conversation with my parents a lot many times. Babel.js, again another very famous open source JavaScript framework, and this is something that we have all seen, right? If Microsoft says is to pay something like this billion dollars, you are like, okay, they're providing with the services, but then if you say, maybe donate something to Babel, yeah, but okay, we'll think about it. So, here's the question that I guess everyone of you already know, like the open source, the free thing in open source, or free open source software doesn't really mean free of cost, it's more about the freedom. So, it's not necessary that everything needs to be free, there has nothing to do with money involved in it. So, in Gitcoin we have actually gone through this problem that's there in both maintainer side and the contributor side, like many of you, okay, another quick show of hand, how many of you are open source contributors of some kind? Like contributor open source projects, awesome. And how many open source maintainers over here? Okay, awesome. So, like there's a problem with contributors as well, okay, there's this extrinsic motivation, there is this maybe bragging rights, that okay, I am a part of this great open source project, there is learning opportunities, there is giving back to the community, a lot many things. But then again it happens about the sustainability, can I really sustain myself by just doing open source contribution rather than doing a proper job? And the same thing happens with maintainer is like if no one is contributing or we don't have a lot of contributors available at the all the time, then you can't really set great roadmaps or timelines so as to say, right? So, this is basically a solution that we kind of work on is like the employers or rather the maintainers can basically have ship ideas which are like creating GitHub issues or whichever way you want to do the ideas, create a feature, whatever be the case, and the talent or the contributor basically ships the code and ideas for them. So, this is the ideology behind this everything, this is not at all something like we have already achieved but this is an end goal that something to do with the jobs looking something more of a mesh network rather than what we have in general like the jobs that we have even most of the companies who say we don't have an hierarchy after all they do have some kind of hierarchy. But this is a more of a mesh network where you can be like, okay I might be the founder but then I contribute to another project and that contributes to my project back and so it's a mesh network. So, everyone contributes to everyone's other project and then even then it's a sustainable ecosystem. So, what we do is in Gitcoin we have this funding platform. So, what we have is a bounty platform, you can create your own issues, you can create your features, whatever you want to do and then a maintainer or anyone would actually come to our platform and fund it and then you can see like all these bounties that are already there in the platform. Benefits of contributions I guess again a slide not important for FOSDM audience but yeah. So, this is basically the Explore Bounty Space where you can see all the issues or bounties that you want to walk upon. There is like it's not like only blockchain developer work, you can have like there are like Django and others have also funded issues over here. So, you can find something of your test if you're like just an UX developer you can basically find something. So, yeah you can go there, you can browse through this and then basically express your interest. So, when the funding happens that's where the blockchain part comes in. So, when you fund an issue you basically use any RC20 tokens or Ethereum and that's when, so via the smart contract it gets into this like the money gets funded into this smart contract and then you can programmatically manage whether like the issue is completed, the bounty is done and then the contributor gets paid out of it. So, the contributor can basically express interest and then begin work. So, this is when the begin work starts it's the same open source flow that we all are familiar with. Go to the issues, chat in the chat rooms, then like go pull request, then all the reviews to and through and then when your work actually gets merged you can basically come back and submit work back. And yeah, when it gets approved by the funder you get paid. So, that's basically the flow for the contributors. That's how we think that the contributors can sustain and there it has been, the Gitcoin has been there for more than a year now and we have seen a lot of contributors who are sustaining themselves just by doing Gitcoin bounties. So, yeah, then there is this another option. This is a sister project of ours called Code Fund. So, this is ethical advertising and it's an open app platform you can all go and check about Code Fund. So, many of you might already know about it. Then recently we started, so this is still in alpha phase but recently we started something called Gitcoin grants. This is more focused towards the maintainers. So, like people of BabelJS or ESLint as we saw. So, most of many of the times we have seen people go create a Patreon account and then sustain themselves, try to sustain themselves by a Patreon account. So, Gitcoin grants is something which uses a subscription protocol of blockchain if anyone is aware of it. So, we use the EIP-1337 standards. So, basically what happens is if you have your own project that you have made open source, so you can go and create a Gitcoin grants, people can come and contribute to the grants and after that you have a subscription model. So, basically you get paid out of it every month. So, that's more about Gitcoin grants and then we have something called QDoS. So, QDoS is just an appreciation system because that's finally something I guess motivates every one of us in doing open source like because our contribution finally matters. So, it's about giving, it's a bad system basically and it's in a blockchain term it's an NFT. So, non-fungible tokens just like if anyone of you have a CryptoKitty you know what I'm talking about. So, QDoS is basically an NFT. You can buy it from our marketplace and then gift it to anyone who you feel, you can give it as a part of your bounty, you can give it just as a sake that you know that this guy does great work in Python or this guy is a great JavaScript developer or anything that you feel is like proper according to the marketplace badges. And that's it, any questions? Questions anyone? Yeah, coming. Quite some questions actually. Hi, thanks for the talk. We've been trying out Gitcoin in the past but had some types of problems that the contributors seem to do the least effort possible to just claim the bounty basically. Do you have any insights into what can be done about that? So, yeah, we did have, like we have seen this coming up sometimes but that's like there are two kind of like stories that we have seen. Sometimes it's mainly because issue is not very properly defined, which it's like a very abstract idea you just put it. So, we generally encourage to bounty something which is only very well defined. You are very well aware of what the deliverables are because whenever you bring money into the equation, it always has this scenario of, okay, I have done my work so I need to get paid. So, it's always better if you have your deliverables all well defined. But then there are sometimes we have also seen that a contributor would be like, like for little changes they would be like, okay, this wasn't mentioned so I wouldn't be doing it. So, in that case, I feel like that's more of the contributors bad. So, it's not something we can do but you can always come back and report it to Gitcoins Slack channel and we try to make the process as smooth as we can. But yeah, try to make your deliverables as detailed as possible so that the contributor can actually like do what they need to do. Anyone else, questions? I saw some more hands a moment ago. Yeah, coming. I don't know it's exactly a Gitcoin question but you mentioned the difficulty for a company to fund open source. What are your thoughts about using crypto and how do you do the whole difficulty with the companies that they have to prove it for their currency and so they need invoices and stuff like that. Will Gitcoin ever be able to solve that? So, if I understand your question correctly, you are asking like what if like non open source companies? If I, as a company you want to fund an open source developer, I need to prove that for my account and see I can not just buy crypto and send it somewhere to an address. No, so you're not sending it to an address over here. So what you do over here is let's say you are a company which uses Babelges very extensively and you have an issue in Babelges which you want a contributor to solve for you and you are okay to fund it for them. So what you do is you come to this platform, you create a fund bounty out of that like issue and it doesn't go to any wallet address. It's just going to your smart contract. So if you don't like the work, you reject it, you get back the money at the end. So it's not with Gitcoin, it's not with you, it's not with the contributor. You're not transferring it to anyone at that state. You will, the money gets transferred only when you accept the work at the very end. So you can always come and fund and then. And it doesn't need to be your own project. You can always fund anyone else's issue. It's more about the need like, if you think it's needed to be funded, then you fund it. Thanks. Yes, my question is how it, do you collaborate with the project itself? I mean, can I find the development, for example, in Babelges, but I'm not a Babelges developer, right? So then, how do you handle, for example, okay, so you have three parties actually. There's a project that needs to accept the request, for example, right? There is the client, it's gonna say, and the developer. How do you handle, I mean, is it, are you integrating with the project itself, or is it completely independent? So yeah, what happens is, let's say you are not a Babelges developer, but, so the pull request finally getting merged will always be dependent on the Babelges maintainers or the reviewers. So that is something that we don't control. Obviously, that is completely a decision of the open source project in themselves. So Babelges will be the ones who will be like, merging the pull request, but at the end of the day, you are the one who have to come back to our platform and accept the pull request, like, accept that the work has been done. So you can basically think that, okay, if it's 90% of the work is done, there is something called advanced payout where you can go and decide how much percentage of the funding you actually want to pay. So you can say, okay, 90% is the thing I think has been done, so I'll pay only 90% and I won't be paying the rest, makes sense. So I have a question, if I'm a contributor and I am working on some issue, do I have some guarantee that the money will be transferred to me or can the originator just take cash, take the money out and leave me with no money? So this is like the common freelancing problem, right? Which we have been trying to solve and that's where actually cryptocurrency and blockchain comes into play really well. So the reason is most of the time when people, so firstly the things are all open source, so your pull request is completely open source, right? So unlike freelancing where you are signing an NDA or something and doing some work for them, you don't really have a proof of work that you have already done something. But then since it's open source, so the pull request is available, everything is done. The only way a funder can actually take back the money is actually reject your work. So if your pull request is done, it's merged, it has already been reviewed properly and merged and then it gets rejected. You have a good way of challenging the funder saying, okay, this was not expected. And obviously from Gitcoin's part, we will be taking our action. But this is something that we had thought that's one of the reasons why we brought into blockchain because no single person is actually holding, like neither Gitcoin has the money till the work is done, neither Gitcoin has the money, nor the funder and nor the contributor. So we have actually not seen this problem happening till now, which is a really good thing. No, so they can't reject it at any time because everything is open source. So everything is very transparent. So they can't just reject your work. Did you experiment with some automation, something like having a contract in between an oracle to, when I merge the request, I just. We do have the smart contract in place, but we haven't made it automated based on just merging of the pull request. So it's like we have purposefully not done that. One of the reasons is, like one thing that he mentioned is like, I can be funding someone else's projects ratio. So it's not always necessary that a pull request merge actually solves the problem that I had. So we leave that at the end of the day to the funder if you're actually willing to pay the entire thing or not. But yeah, that's one of the reasons that we don't do it programmatically after pull request. Because even in open source, you will see that sometimes a pull request gets merged but it's not necessary that the entire issue gets solved. Thank you everyone.